Bloodied and bullet-torn, Pa.’s collection of Civil War battle flags featured in new exhibit

Battle-stained flags that survived ferocious fighting fill drawers in cabinets inside the Pennsylvania Civil War Battle Flag Education Center in Harrisburg.

Each one serves as a memento of a fight to preserve the Union and a connection to the Pennsylvanians who participated in that war. Some are in tatters; others riddled with bullet holes.

But all are treasured and conserved to the greatest extent possible for schoolchildren, Civil War enthusiasts and re-enactors and historians to see these 19th century communication tools that gave soldiers on the noisy, chaotic battlefields their direction.

While the flags in and of themselves are available to view at the education center by appointment, soon an exhibit will provide a starting point to explain the significance of each one of the banners that rest in the climate-controlled vault in the next room where these Civil War artifacts are stored.

The Capitol Preservation Committee last spring hired Exhibit Studios Inc. of Harrisburg to design and install the exhibit at a cost of $370,300. It is expected to be completed next July.

Money for the education center comes partially from the Burgess McCormac Foundation ($30,000) and from the Capitol Restoration Trust Fund, which is funded through private donations and sale of the committee’s commemorative items, with the balance from the committee’s restoration allocation in the budget, said David Craig, the committee’s executive director.

The exhibit will feature touch screens allowing visitors to browse the entire collection of 403 flags where they learn a little about the battle where they were carried, the regiment each represents, and the flag-bearer’s name who carried it if it is known.

It also will have a display that tells the story behind the collection itself and how it came to be as well as feature some other Civil War artifacts on loan from The State Museum of Pennsylvania, the nearby Civil War Museum or from Gettysburg.

The battle flag education center, which has been open at its off-the-track location at 22nd and Forster streets in Harrisburg since July 2020, annually draws visitors who have an interest in learning more about this bloodied chapter of the nation’s history and Pennsylvanians’ role in it.

Jason Wilson, the historian for the Capitol Preservation Committee, leads the tours at the facility. He possesses a wealth of knowledge about the historical significance of each banner in the collection. It includes 374 flags from the Civil War, 22 from the Spanish-American Ward and a couple pre-Civil War state militia company flags from the 1820s and 1830s.

“They were the lifeblood of the regiment,” Wilson said, speaking about the importance the regimental flags to the troops. “Each of them represents a thousand men from the commonwealth that went off initially to fight in the war.”

Today, the flags are artifacts. Back then, Wilson said they were a tool of war, kind of a 19th century radio communication system. With the flag-bearer positioned at the center of the line, men would keep an eye on where their flag was. If it advanced, the battle line advanced. If it went backward, that’s what the regiment would do.

“When folks come in to see them, the biggest thing that they don’t anticipate is how large they actually are,” Wilson said. “They’re basically six-feet square with a nine and a half foot staff. They were made to be visible.”

On the battlefield where the flag also helped to distinguish Union troops from the Confederate soldiers, he said, “you couldn’t see or hear or think. You had your training but you were looking to the center of the line to know what to do. You might hear some of the orders but you just kind of follow the flag in the melee of combat. That’s why they were so critical.”

They also were used to rally men during the battle. “Many victories would have been lost if not for a brave flag-bearer encouraging the men to fight on while gripping the precious icon,” states a booklet prepared by the Capitol Preservation Committee about the historic flag collection.

“You hear stories of the bearer goes down, next man up, their rifle goes down, the flag goes back up. If he’s shot, they pick the flag up. They kept the flag aloft. They protect the flag,” Wilson said. “More medal of honors were awarded for actions involving Civil War flags than for any other reason during the Civil War.”

The collection contains the flags as well as the staffs on which they were carried. Some of the staffs also show signs of war with nicks from flying bullets and missing pieces that required the flag-bearer to find leather tack, binder twine or whatever he could get his hands on to hold the staff together to keep the flag flying high.

For Civil War enthusiast RandyDrais of York, who had an ancestor wounded during the Battle of Gettysburg and who has a website and Facebook page to honor soldiers who fought in that battle, the flag collection provides a visual reminder of those soldiers’ contribution to American history.

“With us being a visual society, what better way to make a connection to the Civil War other than going to a particular battlefield is to see your ancestor’s flag from a regiment that you read about and see the damage to the flag and the bullet holes. If that doesn’t give meaning of the Civil War to you, I don’t know what will,” he said.

Wilson agrees. “This is to me the closest you can come to what each regiment went through by looking at what their flag went through.”

The commonwealth’s flags, which the General Assembly appropriated money to purchase in 1861, were formally returned to the commonwealth following an Independence Day parade in Philadelphia in 1866 by General George Meade, who is credited as the hero of the Battle of Gettysburg.

In his comments as he turned the colors over to Governor Andrew Curtin on that day, Meade is recorded as saying, “Receive them, sir, as mementoes of the prowess and deeds of valor of the noble sons of Pennsylvania.”

In 1914, those mementoes were placed unfurled in an “airtight” display case in the state Capitol Rotunda and remained there untouched until 1985.

It was a request from a re-enactment group of 87th Pennsylvania unit from York in 1981 that sparked the effort to begin conserving these artifacts.

Ruthann Hubbert-Kemper, the Capitol Preservation Committee executive director at the time, said when the 87th regimental flag was removed from the Rotunda case, all that was left were fragments with the gold fringe attached to its edges, or fly in flag terminology, being the strongest material that survived.

“That gave us an indication of what we might be expected to find with all the flags in the cases in the Rotunda,” Hubbert-Kemper said.

So one-by-one, the flags were moved out of the Rotunda cases to the storage facility at Tenth and Market for documentation and conservation over the course of seven years. Two years ago, the Capitol Preservation Committee moved the entire collection to its new home at the education center.

Today, Wilson said about 85% of the flags are good shape but all have a story behind them.

There’s the one that was second issued color for the 97th Pennsylvania regiment that is believed to bear the bloodstain of the wounded flag-bearer who carried it and 107 bullet holes from the battle to capture Fort Fisher in Wilmington, N.C.

Another from the 52nd Pennsylvania regiment was the first Union flag to fly over the recaptured Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired.

Among the many others, there’s the flag that belonged to the 151st Pennsylvania regiment made up of over 100 Pennsylvania school teachers who fought in the Battle of Gettysburg and lost 337 of their 467-member unit, one of the highest casualty rates for a Union regiment in that battle.

Wilson is hopeful when the exhibit is done next summer that the Capitol Preservation Committee will be able to better market this treasured collection of flags with an inestimable value to Civil War enthusiasts and invite them to “come see what the commonwealth did for the flags to gain several hundred years of preservation.”

Drais, too, looks forward to that part of the center being completed to help visitors gain an even broader understanding of what these artifacts represent.

“When you see the holes and damage in that flag, you can’t help but visualize in your mind what your ancestors went through to some minor degree fighting for that flag,” Drais said. “Although you can’t touch them, to be able to see them up close, to me it gives you a more personal connection to your ancestor, your history and the country’s history.”