Home >  Local News

Carried into 19 battles by Allegheny College soldiers, bloodied banner now restored

Friday, June 14, 2002

By Marylynne Pitz, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Like the soldiers from Allegheny College who carried it into battle, this Civil War flag was battered, bloodied and torn.

But unlike so many soldiers, this 5-foot-wide, 10-foot-long banner, with 13 stripes and 34 stars, survived its tour of Antietam, Fredericksburg, Second Bull Run and Gettysburg.

Sewn by women in Crawford County, the flag was presented to the students as they marched off to join the Union Army in 1861. Fifty to 65 students fought under the banner in 19 battles as members of Company I, 10th Pennsylvania Reserves, 39th Pennsylvania Volunteers.

In 1998, 137 years later, Jonathan Helmreich, the college historian, set out to find the flag. The retired history professor learned it was displayed in 1909, on the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, and in 1915, during the college's centennial celebration. Then it was stored and forgotten.

Helmreich searched two years for the flag, which is banded in red because it was made in wartime. Flags made during times of peace are banded in white.

"I couldn't believe that it had just disappeared, although you always feared that it might have walked away," he said.

"We kept looking and looking and nobody could trace it. We could find no written reference to it. I hadn't given up but nobody had any idea where it would be," Helmreich said.

Nobody except Joanne LaTourette, a retired college cataloguer who had returned part-time to the campus library. Recalling that many items were moved and stored when a new library was built in 1976, LaTourette directed Helmreich to a back room and a series of cabinets.

In the summer of 2000, Helmreich cleaned out three cabinets in the library, finding a piece of the brig USS Niagara, a general's epaulets, caps worn by Allegheny College freshmen in the 1870s and strips cut from a World War I service flag for which he had also searched.

"The trail was getting warm but the cabinets were [otherwise] empty. I started to put everything back in" the newspaper-lined shelves, Helmreich said.

"I heard my late father's voice -- 'Don't be so lazy, young man. Replace that shelf paper.' In obedience to my absent father, I dug out some more newspaper. I saw one roll shoved way back in the farthest dark corner. I fished it out and it was a little too heavy. It was dated 1961. I unrolled it and inside was the flag. I said, 'Hooray, we finally found it,'"

Restored at a cost of $6,500 by Textile Preservation Associates in Keedysville, Md., the fine wool challis-and-twill banner is encased in a glass and aluminum frame. Soon, it will hang on the west wall of the foyer in the college's Pelletier Library.

The flag's size -- most company flags were just six feet square instead of 50 -- and the arrangement of its 34 stars are unusual.

Thirty of the flag's stars are arranged in an ellipse and there is a single star in each of the four corners of the canton, the heraldic field that holds the stars.

"They made it almost a square or horizontal canton," when vertical cantons were more typical, Helmreich said.

Embroidered on one side are the words "Our Country" and on the other "Semper Fidelis," Latin for "always faithful," which later became the motto of the Marine Corps. On the Semper Fidelis side, the names of the 19 battles are stenciled in white stripes.

While the flag was being preserved, textile analysts found hemoglobin in some of the top stripes, an indicator that it was bloodstained. There were saber cuts and shrapnel holes. A large tear showed that the flag was once almost ripped from its stanchion. Faint, acrid smells of gunpowder and campfire smoke could still be detected.

The Flag Day holiday, observed today, traces to June 14, 1777, when the Continental Congress adopted the stars and stripes as our national symbol. But it didn't become a national holiday until much later.

The late William T. Kerr, a former Collier resident who lived in the township's Rennerdale area from 1911 to 1928, spent most of his life lobbying for a national holiday to honor the flag, and was present in 1949 when President Harry S. Truman signed the bill officially creating Flag Day.

There is a final bit of symmetry in the tale of Allegheny College's beloved banner.

When members of Company I mustered out on June 11, 1864, Lt. Colonel Ira Ayer Jr., a Bible scholar who had risen through the ranks and been wounded seriously at the Battle of the Wilderness, returned home to Meadville. There, he married Hattie Bain, the woman who had presented the flag to the volunteers with whom he had served.