The cheery, tinny music of a banjo and a pile of amputated limbs greeted visitors to the encampment of Company B of the 20th Regiment of Maine Volunteers, civilian soldiers who risked all to fight for their country’s unity in the Civil War.

The banjo is real, the limbs are fake – thankfully – and the historical reenactors inhabiting two rows of canvas tents are something in between. As frequently as every summer weekend, they doff their 21st-century jobs, cars, houses and amenities (such as plumbing) to dress in 1860s-era garb, sleep on the ground, cook in tin cans over campfires, and go to the restroom in portable toiles. Nurses, teachers, housewives and cubicle dwellers, they live disparate lives but for one passion – bringing history alive by living it themselves.

Of Company B’s roughly 50 dues-paying members, about 30 participated in the Civil War encampment last weekend in Memorial Park during Scarborough’s 350th celebration, spending two nights under the stars and two days as living history models for thousands of celebrants.

Homemaker Malta Lee Phelps of Tenants Harbor became involved in Company B about six years ago at the invitation of another company member. Married to bookworm and history buff Richard Wall, a lobsterman, Phelps said she hates reading but was attracted to the idea of actually living like historical figures did.

Today, she dresses in period-correct 1860s attire, down to the wool stockings and long thick skirt in the July heat, and specializes in “the language of fans,” handkerchief dolls, and the life of Lt. Col. Joshua Chamberlain, a Bowdoin professor who led the 20th Regiment and was a pivotal force in the Battle of Gettysburg.

Her husband, originally less than enthusiastic about historical reenactment, has warmed considerably to the concept and now portrays a 20th Regiment volunteer. Last year they did a historical re-enactment almost every weekend.

While the volunteer encampment in Scarborough was not 100 percent historically correct, reenactors say – for example, there’s a large number of women for a Civil War encampment – each participant has a specific character or role to play, and in addition is expected to develop a period specialty or craft that he or she can demonstrate to the public.

On of the most popular displays – at least with women visitors – was “the clothesline.”

“We get asked a million times what’s under there,” Phelps said, indicating her full skirts.

The clothesline displays all of the undergarments worn by women of the 1860s, and visitors are welcome to try them on.

“We explain how a woman would get dressed in the morning, the etiquette for the clothes, and we would dress a person in (the period) dress,” explained Susan Batty, a nurse from South Thomaston.

For a woman in the 1860s, the first item of clothing was stockings, held up by a garter belt, followed by pantalettes, a slip called a “chemise” and shoes. Over the chemise, a woman laced her corset, which was followed by a corset cover and a “modesty slip” to keep the fastenings from showing. A woman then donned her “hoop,” a cloth underskirt with wide circular hoops to support the broad skirts fashionable at the time. Over al this, a woman wore her dress, and to protect the dress from staining, added a collar at the neck and undersleeves at the cuffs.

Depending on her station in life, a woman might wear as many as 13 petticoats, which, combined with the corset, likely contributed to 19th-century ladies’ propensity for fainting.

Retired high school history teacher Paul Dudley of Easton is the camp entertainment director, “in charge of the prostitution, drinking and gambling.”

Dudley said there’s a certain romanticism about the Civil War period that has always appealed to him.

“I hate to use the word ‘romance’ because it’s an awful word to use for a war, but it was the last ‘civilized’ war,” he said.

Unlike more modern civil wars around the world, he said, the American Civil War wasn’t a struggle about classes, but stemmed from fundamental disagreements about what role the government should have in the lives of the young country’s citizens.

“It wasn’t slavery, per say. It was a war about how the government should function,” he said. “Part of the attraction is getting … all kinds of different people learning a little bit of history here. Being an educator, I really enjoy the education part.”

Families pay $20 a year to be members of the 20th Regiment – the money pays for liability insurance – and also provide all of their own clothing, tents, bedding, food and exhibit materials, from blacksmithing tools to guns to dresses, dolls and quill pens, wool stockings and tin cups.

“We live here. We stay, we sleep here, we eat here. It’s not just finish it up and go to a motel,” Phelps said. “We try to live it. What interests me is how the women lived and how the families lived, the harshness of it, actually. In some ways it was much better, much simpler. It was much harsher in other ways … death came quickly.”

Wall likes to remind visitors that Maine sent more soldiers to the Civil War battlefronts, per capita, than any other state.

“When Lincoln called, the boys of Maine answered,” he said.

The Civil War changed life for everyone in Maine, not just the men who volunteered to fight it. Many women followed along behind their husbands and brothers as the 20th Regiment traveled from Maine to bloody southern battlefields, braving cold, hunger, war injuries and death to serve their young country. Most camps had a washer-woman and nurses, Wall said, and some women even disguised themselves as men to join in the fight, going undetected until they were wounded.

Women who stayed behind had to learn to run farms and homesteads on their own, learning men’s trades and skills and serving as both mother and father to their children. As re-enactors quickly learn, little about life in the 1860s was easy.

Re-enactors says that gives them a deep respect for their forefathers.

“I think you’ve got to know where you’re coming from in order to know where you’re going,” Phelps said.