Or maybe this one?
Posted on 07/05/2008 7:42:49 AM PDT by Puppage
Hartford (WTNH) _ A long forgotten flag was discovered at the Connecticut Historical Society and it dates back to the days of President Abraham Lincoln.
Dr. Susan Schoelwer from the Connecticut Historical Society says a handwritten note accompanied the flag inside a simple black box.
"You know we have a lot of stuff with a lot of little notes on them. Some of them are true and some of them are not," Susan said.
In this case the note claims that the tattered American flag was present at a traumatic event in American history and the hand of a great leader was clutching the flag in his final moments.
"There are 35-stars on this flag so that tells us it is a Civil War era flag," Susan explained.
Like a detective Dr. Schoelwer investigated. The trail took her to Washington and culminated in a moment that every historian would relish. It was the moment she confirmed the flag was used to decorate the presidential box the night President Lincoln took his wife to Ford's theater.
According to news accounts, Lincoln was grasping the flag the moment he was shot by John Wilkes Booth.
Susan says the flag made its way to Hartford. "In the late 19th Century there was a interior decorator here in Hartford and his name was Edgar Yergason," she explained.
Yergason was a Civil War veteran and collector who happened to do some work at the White House. After his death, his son donated the flag to the Historical Society.
The Historical Society is planning to put the Lincoln flag back on public display sometime early next year.
No but they will if given the chance.
All it takes is one person without honor to desecrate the flag and go unpunished to tarnish all the flags.
FWIW the War Department had over two million photographic plates taken during the Civil War. They were glass negatives, most undeveloped.
Printing and cataloging them would have been a huge task and most were of almost no historical value. Go to a second hand store and rummage through old photos of people’s ancestors to get a feeling for what a I mean.
Every historical society (many completely volunteer staffed) has boxes of things that are only interesting on close inspection and are almost impossible to accurately catalog.
There was an e-mail going around with a photo from Gettysburg. Lincoln standing above the crowd to the left of center. Supposedly mid speech.
A few years back, I told an historian: "If you ever see anything like "this", let me know". He left the room and returned a few minutes later with a "this" dated 1795.
Is it this one?
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3004/2597452711_cdd1d7c197_o.jpg
Or maybe this one?
The 2008 article says: "There are 35-stars on this flag."
The one with the eagle is a Treasury Flag:
According to an excerpt from a 2001 article on this page, there were five flags that surrounded the President's box that night:
The excerpted article begins under the title "Overview."
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