Photo by Graham Cullen Faith Farley of Concord, Va., talks about the role women played during the Battle of Gettysburg, which will be re-enacted this weekend.

But hundreds of female re-enactors come to Gettysburg each summer to take on the roles wives, mothers, sisters and daughters played in the pivotal three-day battle.

"Some dressed as men and fought alongside their husbands, but mostly they were nurses or took care of fires, cooking, cleaning, sewing, and everything else that needed to be done," said Andrea DiMartino, media supervisor for the annual event.

Female re-enactors stay in both the military and civilian camps on the Gettysburg farm where the re-enactment is held, but most are stationed in the living history area of the site, DiMartino said.

Lynn Warsing, of Madera, Pa., has been re-enacting Civil War battles for seven years, and said she's been everything from a nurse, to a wife, to a doctor, to a washerwoman and seamstress.

"The only thing I don't do is shoot the rifles," she said.

Helping Warsing set up the site's medical station Thursday morning was Beverly Pelcher, who will serve as head of the nurses' corps this weekend.

"There were no Clara Bartons in the Civil War," said Pelcher, of Annandale, Va. "You had a hospital steward, who was a uniformed man, and nuns who helped him."

When Dorothea Dix was commissioned by the government to put together a nurses' corps in 1861, women became a recognized part of the war's medical relief, Pelcher said. But civilian women continued to help in other ways as battles destroyed both northern and southern towns.

"The women of Gettysburg whose husbands had left to fight pitched in and helped out, bringing in the wounded, writing letters and reading to them, anything to keep their spirits up while they recovered," she said.

While many women took care of soldiers' medical needs, some looked after the men's spiritual well-being.

Faith Farley, whose husband has portrayed a chaplain in re-enactments for more than 20 years, will take on the traditional duties of a clergyman's wife again this weekend.

Farley, from Concord, Va., will distribute reprints of Civil War-era Christian tracts to soldiers and spectators.

Her daughter, Katherine, 18, who was 2 months old at her first Gettysburg re-enactment, will spend her weekend handing out tracts with her mother and spinning yarn.

Women play the role of sutlers, too.

Civil War sutlers supplied soldiers with "whatever the military didn't give them," said Linda Lammers, who, along with her husband, Jim, travels to re-enactments with their stock of uniforms, dresses, shoes and supplies to sell to re-enactors.

Even though Lammers won't be on the battlefield this weekend, she and all the other women on Sutlers' Row will be in period dress at all times, per event rules.

And some female re-enactors come to Gettysburg just to add to the battle's backdrop.

"Some just stroll through the site to make it look authentic," DiMartino said.

Nearly 3,000 re-enactors, male and female, are expected in Gettysburg this weekend, DiMartino said, an average number for a "non-five-year event."

Battle action begins today at 6 p.m. and continues tomorrow and Sunday.