INDIANAPOLIS —
The Indiana War Memorial Museum staff was excited to receive a phone call from the FBI back in 2007 with good news about a lost treasure: A Civil War flag stolen from the museum years earlier had shown up as an auction item on eBay.
The murky tale of how it got there — involving a small town bank president who liked to collect antiquities and may have used bank funds to do so — was less compelling to the museum staff than the condition the flag was in.
The 6-foot by 6-foot regimental flag, known to have accompanied Union soldiers from Indiana into the epic battles at Shiloh and Vicksburg and on Sherman’s famous March to the Sea, had been glued and stapled to a piece of plywood for display.
Beyond the damage done to the flag’s decaying fabric, museum staff felt as if a sacred piece of history had been damaged too.
“Every one of these flags has its own sacred story,” said Brig. Gen. J. Stewart Goodwin, executive director of the Indiana War Memorials. “Every day we come to work to do something to preserve and protect those stories.”
Their effort to do so is more challenging now. This past year’s state budget cuts, which took its toll on education funding and state agencies, also meant a loss of revenue for the state’s war memorials.
The Indiana War Memorial Museum — a mausoleum-style limestone and marble structure that looms 210 feet tall — is home to 450 battle flags, each with a tie to Indiana.
More than 100 of those flags were carried into battle by Indiana regiments during the Civil War.
Most carry the regiment’s name and the famous battles it survived.
“This is our history,” said Goodwin. “And it needs to be preserved.”
That was the intent of the federal government when it put out a call for battle flags at the end of the Civil War. The flags were then entrusted to state governments for long-term care.
But Indiana’s battle flags have gone through periods of attention and neglect. For 70 years, they were displayed in the Indiana Statehouse with little protection. By the mid-1990s, they were in a museum basement, deteriorating from age, mold and other contaminants.
That’s when a group of Indianapolis schoolchildren, with help from teacher Donna Schmink, appealed to state lawmakers to allocate funding for restoration and preservation of the flags.
That preservation project continues, led by textiles restoration expert Jennifer Hein and Schmink, who’s now a museum specialist. But it’s dependent on private contributions. In early August, the Indiana War Memorial Foundation announced plans for a major fundraising campaign to support both the flag preservation project and the historic building that houses them.
Money raised could go to fund DNA testing on blood-soaked remnants of Civil War battle flags too damaged to be repaired. Results could reveal more about where the flags were flown, Schmink said. “These flags are more of a witness to history than we know.”
Maureen Hayden is Statehouse bureau chief for CNHI’s Indiana newspapers. She can be reached at maureen.hayden@indianamediagroup.com.
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