Refreshing history

IONIA — The battle flag carried by Michigan’s 21st Regiment during the Civil War and placed on display in the Ionia County Courthouse shortly thereafter was pulled down, wrapped in tissue paper and crated up Tuesday afternoon.
Now the flag is on its way by car to Textile Preservation Associates (TPA) of Ranson, West Virginia, where it will spend 12 to 14 months being revitalized before returning to its courthouse perch.
Tuesday’s event was attended by a couple of dozen interested local residents, several members of the Ionia County Board of Commissioners, representatives of local veterans groups and five living descendants of the soldiers of the 21st Regiment.

Ionia County Commissioner Jack Shattuck said when he started 28 years ago, board meetings were held in the courthouse, so he was intimately familiar with the flag.
“I just came out here to be a part of it, because it’s an important event,” Shattuck said. “We’re restoring something for, not only one or two generations, but hopefully for hundreds of years so it will be able to be enjoyed by future generations.”
The ceremony began with a few brief words from the two men who spearheaded the preservation project: David Huhn VFW Post 12082 Post Commander Shane Houghton and Muir-Lyons VFW Post 4646 Commander Eric Calley.
“This will be the first time that this flag has been off the wall for the last 60 years, from the last time it was preserved,” Calley noted. “Shane and I have been working hard over the last eight months, with help from the VFWs, American Legions, Lions Clubs and a lot of the Michigan public, to be able to raise almost $45,000 out of the $50,000 needed. We are totally excited to take this flag down and send it for preservation.”
Next, living descendants of veterans of the 21st Regiment were honored with a handmade plaque that will eventually be presented to the family’s matriarch, who was unable to attend Tuesday’s event.
“This just all kind of happened by chance, and I am very honored to be here and part of this,” said Joanie Kilchermann, a descendant of Alvin Guernsey, who was severely wounded at the Second Battle of Murfreesboro in Tennessee on Dec. 21, 1862, but who survived the war.
An image of Guernsey as an old man is laser-engraved on the plaque.
Matthew VanAcker of the Michigan State Capitol Commission shared a few words about the preservation process before he and two state conservationists, May Oyler and Cambray Sampson, carefully peeled the flag from its backing and laid it out on tissue paper-covered tables before rolling it up and placing it into a large, wooden crate that was screwed shut. Once the flag was crated, County Maintenance Department employees Rod Steele and Craig Wirtz carried it to VanAcker’s vehicle for the road trip to West Virginia.
“This flag has sort of been on my radar for the 30 years I’ve worked with the state project to preserve our battle flag collection, and it was concerning to us just in the way it was displayed,” VanAcker said. “After the ceremony is finished, we’ll be very carefully removing the flag from the wall, we’ll be very carefully rolling it up, basically, on a drum, and the drum will go into a crate. This Thursday afternoon (today), my wife and I will be driving it out to Ranson, West Virginia to one of the nation’s leading battle flag conservators, who will be taking excellent care of the flag.”
VanAcker explained that a previous effort to preserve the flag in the 1960s that involved using a sewing machine to stitch it onto a polyester netting was good because the netting was likely the only thing keeping the flag in one piece, but it was bad because the sewing machine made thousands of tiny holes and introduced anachronistic 1960s thread to the piece. All of this will be dealt with by TPA in Ranson as they restore the flag.
The Michigan’s 21st Regiment battle flag was commissioned by “the ladies of Ionia” in 1862 and carried by local soldiers through the Civil War. It is made of hand-embroidered dark blue silk, and the center has a large American flag, a bald eagle holding a quiver of arrows and an olive branch and a banner with the words “Union” and “Constitution.”

21st Regiment history

The 21st Regiment of the all-volunteer Michigan Infantry was organized in Ionia and Grand Rapids and mustered in on Sept. 9, 1862. The regiment was comprised of soldiers from Michigan’s 4th Congressional District, which then included Barry, Ionia, Montcalm, Kent, Ottawa, Muskegon, Oceana, Newaygo, Mecosta, Mason, Manistee, Grand Traverse, Leelanau, Manitou, Osceola, Emmet, Mackinac, Delta and Cheboygan counties.
Under the command of Brig. Gen. Ambrose Stevens, the Michigan 21st departed for Cincinnati, Ohio on Sept. 12, 1862, then moved on to Louisville, Kentucky, where they were attached to the 37th Brigade of the 11th Division of the Army of the Ohio.
During the Civil War, the 2,412 soldiers of the Michigan 21st marched across the South and saw action at the Battles of Perryville, Stone’s River, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Savannah, Averasboro and Bentonville, and they took part in Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s infamous march to the sea. They also engaged in engineering duty for a period, building and maintaining bridges, storehouses, hospitals and mills in the South.
After the war concluded, the regiment mustered out on June 8, 1865, having lost 377 men, 291 from disease.
The 21st’s battle flag was returned to Ionia County on July 4, 1865, where it was put on display in the courthouse.
“On July 4, 1865 when the 21st Regiment came back to Ionia County, the state of Michigan asked for their battle flags back,” Calley recounted. “The commanding officer said, ‘You can have four out of the five.’ Then they bestowed the stewardship of this flag in Ionia County, and I’m so glad to be here today to let everybody know that we’re keeping the stewardship here and this flag will be on public display for the rest of its life.”

Saving the flag

The last time anybody did any touch-up work on the flag was during the 1960s, and the rare close look at the artifact that was possible this week immediately revealed the signs of deterioration. The flag is transparent in places, once bright colors have nearly faded away and small pieces are missing.
Last May, Lansing-area Civil War reenactor Maurice Imhoff asked the Ionia County Board of Commissioners to consider donating the 21st Regiment’s flag to the state’s “Save the Flags” program, who would take it to Lansing, restore it and add it to the rest of their large collection of Civil War flags. After that, the Ionia County flag would only be displayed to the public occasionally or by special request, and only in Lansing.
Flags in the state’s collection are displayed on a rotating basis for one month at time. The state owns about 260 Civil War and other historic flags, so Ionia’s flag would only be on display about once every 13 years after its restoration.
County commissioners were only mildly receptive to this, so VanAcker appeared at a subsequent meeting and made a similar appeal for a donation of the flag, stressing its fading color, deterioration and the high cost of restoration.
Local veterans understood the need to preserve and maintain the flag so future generations of Ionians can maintain a tangible, local connection to history, but they felt that when the flag was brought back to Ionia in 1865, that was where it was meant to stay. Thus began months of fundraising, culminating in Tuesday’s flag extraction action.
Eventually, the county agreed to pay the $47,375 contract with TPA while the VFW fundraised for the full amount. They have returned $25,000 to the county while they continue fundraising, a process they expect to complete by the end of the week.
“So far we’ve made about $41,000, but we’ve spent about $8,000,” Houghton said. “Right now, we need about $6,000 and we expect to be able to get that within a short period of time.”
“We’re hoping to be done fundraising by next week,” Calley agreed. “We’re hoping that today’s media exposure will help.”

After preservation plans

When the flag returns, it will be placed in a humidity-controlled, UV-light sensitive, plexiglass display container and hung back on the same wall at the courthouse. Reproductions have already been created for use in parades and other special events.
“They’re going to take it and lay it out, and they’re going to hand-snip one thread at a time to take off all that netting from the 1960s and get all that thread out of there, just one thread at a time,” Houghton explained. “That’s why it’s going to take so long and why it’s so expensive to do that. Then they’re going to put it on a special backing and put it into a pressurized frame so that it can come back and be controlled. The pressurized display case container is going to hold it up so it won’t tear itself apart, and it’ll be UV-protected and all that. So it will be there for another 160 years, then somebody else can come along and take up the torch.”
To donate, visit the “Go Fund Me” page at gofundme.com/f/f4g3u-save-our-flag. If sending a donation via check, write “flag” on it and mail it to VFW 12082, 1131 E. Tuttle Road, Ionia MI 48846. For more information about the restoration project, visit vfw4646.com.