Motorcycling along the highways of Pennsylvania, Roger Kirwin sees the ghosts of Redcoats cutting paths across the state’s landscape in 1758, laying the groundwork for a road still traveled today.

“The French and Indian War was all about movement,” says Kirwin, executive director of Old Bedford Village, the living-history center on the site of the 18th-century fortress in Bedford County. “It was about, ‘How do you move 7,000 soldiers back and forth across the state’s woodlands?’ And when you move around Pennsylvania today, you trace those movements. Look just off the turnpike, and you see woodlands that aren’t much different than they were 250 years ago. There are very few places left where you can look at history like that.”

What’s not always so apparent is which history is on display at the Village. Despite the center’s direct link to the French and Indian War, visitors are just as likely to encounter people dressed in Confederate gray or Napoleonic-era uniforms.

“The thing about Old Bedford Village is its versatility,” says Kirwin, known to don a red coat himself as a French and Indian War reenactor. And it’s towards that end that the Village was awarded a Grassroots Grant to build its new pan coupe redan—a type of defensive structure used in the U.S. and Europe from the 1750s through the early-20th century.

With the redan’s addition, Old Bedford Village solidified itself as a premier location for living historians, no matter what era they cast themselves in. Those historians and hobbyists have responded in kind. Not only did groups of reenactors aid in the construction of the redan, the structure has attracted attention from hundreds who gleefully used this newly-added authenticity and attended 2008’s celebrations of Bedford’s 250th anniversary. And drawing those people to Bedford, says Kirwin, makes the Village a more dynamic educational and cultural amenity.

“When you can bring the places and characters of history to life, the public gets more interested,” says Kirwin. “It takes things out of the realm of academia and into a tactile, tangible understanding of history. We give living historians a marvelous canvas for reenactments, and, in return, they come here and give the public something to see.”