We are putting on a play about Manse Jolly and the time of Reconstruction in Pickens, Oconee and Anderson counties, when we were under martial law and occupied by federal troops.

One of the sets for the play is Gettysburg, or at least our interpretation of Gettysburg. We picked the area of the Devil’s Den, an area covered with large granite boulders and the site of fierce fighting and great loss of life.

Fowler is the set designer and prop builder. I paint and look up directions on how to make rock out of paper and how to make cardboard look like wood.

I found directions online which said we should first shape our boulders from chicken wire, then mix up a flour and water paste and create a rock surface out of paper mache. The step-by-step pictures online didn’t look all that hard, so we bought the wire and went to work.

Our boulders were large. One was about five feet long and three feet high. The other was slightly smaller. We got the wire shaped into what looked like a rock, then mixed up our flour paste.

We started with five pounds of flour. Before we finished the project, we’d used 15 pounds of flour.

We first used sheets of newspaper. After realizing it might take longer to cover the wire with paper than we had left to live, we switched to brown wrapping paper. We treated it like wallpaper and paste, except we coated both sides, saturating it before fitting it over the wire base.

It was one of the messiest projects ever done in the tractor shed. At least we had some assistance. All five dogs were part of the paper mache rock team. They stood beneath the sawhorses while we spread paste all over the paper.

When I started shaping the paper over the wire, they worked hard to lick all the paste off the paper.

Soon they were pretty well covered with thick splotches of flour paste. It dried on their fur and gave them a spiked look. I looked like the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

The step-by-step directions online said the whole thing should take about two hours. I sincerely hope they were making much smaller rocks, because it took us almost a week to complete our rocks. And that was just the paper mache part. Next came the painting. I must say that was a lot easier. We took a rock out of the yard to Home Depot and got the color matched, spread it on the rock, then spray painted some lighter and darker color. It looked pretty good.

Then we had to find a place to keep the rocks, because Fowler had to move the Farmall tractor back into the tractor shed. After some rearranging, we were able to get the rocks into the bay formerly occupied by the horse trailer, which is temporarily parked in the tractor yard.

The rocks are in good company out there with the fireplace for the log cabin, the picket fence for the village green, the log cabin walls and the old wooden wagon wheel that now serves as a wheel off a field cannon, lost on the way to the battle when it came off near the rocks.

All that’s left to do now is finish painting the log cabin wall to look like logs and construct the shelving for the general store set. Fowler is building that. And then we’ll be ready.

If you want to see some pretty decent-looking rocks, come to the Liberty Civic Auditorium on March 12 and 13. They’ll be on stage.