Michigan town refuses to give up a historic flag

IONIA — A promise is a promise, and he intends to keep it.

There’s an old flag hanging in the historic courthouse in downtown Ionia. It’s deep blue, woven from silk and embroidered with a message. And it’s been up on the wall for so long that it's blended into the background.

“I think a lot of people had forgotten about it,” said Shane Houghton, 72, a longtime resident. “Some did know it was there, but I don’t know if they really understood the significance of it. I’ve talked to some that said, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen that flag there a number of times; I just never stopped and thought about it.’ ”

That flag was given by the women of the town to local soldiers marching off to fight in the Civil War 160 years ago. The men carried it through all their battles. When the survivors came home, they gave that flag back to Ionia. Please take care of it, they said, in memory of what we did.

It’s been on public display inside the ornate courthouse ever since. But over the years the flag grew brittle. The elements took their toll. Restoration costs a fortune, and the county couldn’t afford it. State officials came to town and offered to take it so it would be better cared for elsewhere. It wasn’t the first time.

“This had come up over the past number of years, and it just kind of reared its head again,” said County Commissioner Gordon Kelley, 63. “Obviously, they’ve been aware of this for a long time and have wanted to make sure this flag was preserved.”

The Michigan Capitol Flag Collection, housed in the Michigan History Center in Lansing, holds 240 battle flags, most from the Civil War. “They were exposed to the elements; they’re on the battlefield with the men; they’re being shot at; they’re being tugged at by Confederates and sometimes ripped to shreds in combat,” said Matt VanAcker, 53, the curator of the collection.

Some of the flags are mere swatches of ragged fabric. Others are pristine and whole. A few have bloodstains and bullet holes. But all are carefully preserved, largely by being kept out of sight in controlled conditions, with just one flag from the collection brought out each month and put on public display.

The flag in the Ionia courthouse is the only known Civil War battle flag from Michigan not in the collection.

So, after seeing the high costs of restoration, and after VanAcker came to town and spoke before the commissioners, the county seemed inclined to let him take it back to Lansing. “To me, it was most important that it be preserved, and we knew that the state would, in perpetuity, have funding for this,” Kelley said.

But one man stood up to protest. The town, he said, had to keep its promise.

“Our forefathers accepted stewardship of that flag 160 years ago, and to let it go now would almost be a betrayal to them,” said Houghton, a Vietnam veteran and former commander of the local VFW post. “We’ve been taking care of it; all those generations have taken care of that flag so far, and that’s what we still need to do.”

There’s no question the flag needs help, he admitted. And the costs would be high, he acknowledged. But if it went to Lansing, the flag would rotate into public view only once every 15 years. Here in Ionia, he noted, it would always be displayed for everyone to see.

What if, he asked the commissioners, he could somehow raise the money so it could stay right here, like the town promised long ago?

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In 1862, the Union army called for volunteers from Michigan. About a thousand men from 18 counties signed up and formed the 21st Volunteer Infantry Regiment. They gathered in Ionia that September for a send-off ceremony. They were given a handcrafted silk flag, fringed in golden thread, embroidered with images of a rippled flag and an eagle bearing an olive branch. “Presented by the Ladies of Ionia,” it read.

It wasn’t just for display. During war, flag bearers helped commanders see and direct the movements of their troops. But that was true of the enemy as well. To confuse the other side’s troops, the first people shot were often the flag-bearers on either side.

“It was a tremendous honor to carry the flag,” VanAcker said. “And it was a death sentence. The flag-bearers bore the brunt of combat during the battles because the Confederates recognized the easiest way to confuse the Union troops was if the flag goes down, you’ll have a whole regiment — or what’s left of them — in disarray, not knowing whether they’re supposed to advance or rally around the flag, literally.”

With so much life lost protecting them, and so much importance placed on keeping them flying, those flags came to symbolize and embody the spirit and character of a unit. And soldiers would give their lives defending it.

“The battle flags are one of the most important things to a military unit,” said Eric Calley, 43, an Iraq War veteran who heard Houghton speak and teamed up with him to keep the Ionia flag in town. “It’s an identifying mark about who your unit is and what they do. And that’s what we bleed for, fight for, get wounded for. That’s what we die for. You don’t go anywhere without it. If you deploy anywhere, that battle flag goes anywhere you go for the lifetime of the unit. When I was in Iraq, we always carried our battle flag with us. And the same thing when the Union Army was fighting the South — all the generals knew that if you took the battle flag you just took the heart and soul of that unit.”

The 21st faced a hellish slog. They marched to the South, through battles in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia. Along the way, their commanding officer was wounded and captured, leaving the soldiers in disarray. They lost 377 men, most of them to disease rather than battle.

The survivors made their way home to Michigan at the end of the war. They turned over four of their battle flags to the state during a Fourth of July ceremony, as required. But they refused to give up one flag that they’d carried through all of their battles. It was the flag from Ionia. Instead, they handed it back to the town.

For all those years since, the flag has hung on the courthouse wall, all the while bathed in light, exposed to swings of temperature and humidity, protected merely by a frame of old wood and a pane of thin glass. In the 1960s, an effort was made to preserve it, which in those days meant ramming it through someone’s sewing machine and attaching a woven mesh to it, using innumerable tiny stitches poked right through this delicate, historic flag.

“The concept is good,” VanAcker said, “but the execution is horrible. Because every time her needle went up and down on that flag, it put a hole in it.”

Now, even that netting is disintegrating. If it falls apart, so will the flag. But restoration is a painstaking process in which conservators use forceps and scissors to snip away one thread at a time until tens of thousands of stitches are gone. And it’s not cheap. The Ionia flag will cost almost $50,000 to repair.

But Hougton’s passion helped persuade the county to let him at least try raising the money to keep the flag in town. So did the unexpected support of the state.

“I think he thought I was going to be an enemy in the project,” VanAcker said. "So when he went up and said, ‘We need to keep it here, this honors the Ionia veterans,’ I went up and shook his hand afterwards and said, ‘I don’t disagree with you.’ ”

Not only has VanAcker arranged for the flag to go to the same historic restoration company the state uses, he’s even going to drive it there himself. In early April, a send-off ceremony will be held in the courthouse, the flag will be carefully taken down from the wall and crated, then it will be driven to Virginia, where a year and a half will be spent preserving it. In the meantime, a replica flag will hang in its place so there's never a time that that flag isn't displayed to the public.

“We need to make sure they understand the importance of our history in honoring those who came before us, to preserve that history so we can know where to go going forward," Houghton said. "That's why it's important to keep it here.”

***

So far, the vets have raised about two-thirds of the money they need by giving presentations, making speeches, hosting a gala and starting a GoFundMe campaign. They have a few more months to keep trying.

For Houghton, all this effort wasn’t merely about hanging onto a keepsake. It was to rescue from forgetfulness the memory of everything these local men went through.

“It’s so sad, but it’s ‘cause it wasn’t part of people’s lives,” Houghton said. “Generation after generation, it kind of fades. But that’s why you have memorials. And that’s what I’m trying to accomplish once we save this flag.”

VanAcker knows the stories behind each flag that he oversees. Some soldiers wrapped themselves in those flags to keep them from the encroaching enemy, which is why some of the flags have bullet holes and bloodstains from when those men were shot. Some were flown by one flag-bearer after another after each one before them was killed. Yet, there never was a shortage of troops willing to pick up a fallen flag. Some came to him as mere fragmented remnants of old flags, stored in the attic of some aging veteran in some small town, who guarded it secretly as a precious relic.

Those men suffered too much, he said, for them to be forgotten. And flags like the old blue one from Ionia serve as a tangible reminder of all they did.

“To me, the important part of this project is not just caring for the artifact, but I want to make sure these stories are remembered, and the men who fought and died beneath these flags are remembered,” VanAcker said. “It’s why so many memorials were put up to the Civil War vets. It wasn’t some vainglorious attempt at immortality. They wanted people to remember what they had done.”

John Carlisle writes about Michigan. His stories can be found at freep.com/carlisle. Contact him: jcarlisle@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @_johncarlisle, Facebook at johncarlisle.freep or on Instagram at johncarlislefreep.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Ionia, Michigan vows to hang onto historic flag