Kinickin Man Creates Gettysburg Replica in Spuds

(Montrose) Melvin Toole had little to do after retiring from Colona Brothers Slaughterhouse in 1991. However, after visiting several Civil War battlegrounds the following summer, he stumbled onto an appropriate project that would keep him busy for many winters to come.

He would recreate the Battle of Gettysburg entirely out of mashed potatoes.

The replica would be in full color and to scale, with moving parts, authentic weaponry, uniforms and structures.

“The first thing I had to do was figure out where to buy the materials, you know, lots of potatoes, butter and milk,” said Toole. “Then I spent months covering the Western Slope in search of a giant mixing device.”

After a rather expensive search (Toole drinks) he found a large concrete blender at an abandoned amalgamation resource just outside of Maybell, in Northwest Colorado. The giant device, once used to churn out time-release blacktop for the Division of Transportation, would be perfect. He hauled the thing home with his diesel-powered 1945 Henway, pulled by over 400 llamas.

After talking to local agricultural co-ops Toole secured the rights to latter day potato crops, mutant wall flower cream supplies and truckloads of unused butter and margarine samples from local restaurants. He was ready to go.

“In order to maintain an air of authenticity I had predetermined that I would use grits in the Confederate mixture,” said Toole, “but then I found out that the Rebel troops under General Robert E. Lee had run out of that staple while crossing the Piedmont Plateau.” (Historical note: Here Toole is full of horse cookies. Actually most of the grit-weary troops were anxious to get up into Pennsylvania for a nice, homestyle breakfast where the corn byproduct was not served).

“Having secured the raw materials I now faced a potential engineering nightmare: How would I create the topography common to hilly South Central Pennsylvania when all I had was mountain spuds from Idaho and Colorado? Oddly enough the answer came easy. I simply added a little less butter to the recipe and flattened out about 35 tons of the mixture onto a piece of waferboard. Then, allowing it to be exposed to the elements overnight, I discarded the board and sat back in awe of my landscape.”

Building the weapons of the day from often whipped potatoes took some time but Toole went about the task with a painstaking eye for detail. At first the muzzles of the canon drooped so he shortened them a bit. Then the wheels on the artillery would not turn properly so he added skimmed milk and a bit of ground basil. The canon balls were the easiest part.

“I just rolled them in gravy and they flew through the air like the real thing,” Toole beamed. “Troops on both sides would have been surprised as one of my spud missiles could easily devastate an ammunition dump or scattered contingents of cavalry.”

In order to keep mashed potatoes earmarked for infantry separate from spuds reserved for, say, hospital corpsman or ordinance battalions, Toole used sophisticated methods of identification.

“Sometimes I added paprika or oregano to certain forces while I relied on my nose to pick out the defenders laced with garlic cloves or white pepper. In keeping with regional cuisine, I always used cayenne on the Southern troops and rosemary on the Union assemblage,” he explained.

“Probably the hardest work came when I started to paint each individual combatant, you know, the blue and the gray,” he mused. “I recall one frightening moment as I reached the final stages of painting soldiers engaged in the famous George E. Pickett’s Charge and I had run out of real milk and had to rely on the powdered variety. At the time I worried that someone would dispute the accuracy of my effort but no one seems to have noticed.”

Toole’s massive creation will be on display at the Montrose Regional Airport through the 2020.