37 Star U.S. Flag - President Abraham Lincoln Memorial, NYC 1865.
This important 37 star U.S. flag was the property of Andrew Shinnick, son of C.T. Black, grandson of General Norton of the Union Army who was wounded at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, Georgia in 1864. This flag it is believed to be associated with President's Lincoln Memorial, 1865.
The flag was in a trunk full of other (approx. 20) Civil War Flags which were damaged in a flood circa. 1955-56. This was one of only two flags to survive.
Family history on the flag.
Andrew Shinnick of TV station KPIX; donated the flag accompanied by the following written narrative:
It comes from my mother's mother, Adel Black Norton (Norton was her married name). She was a New Yorker. Her father, Charles Black, was a financier who owned a large brownstone home around 125th St. in Manhattan (he also owned a bank in Paris!).
Black collected things ... guns, coins and flags. The flag was, according to family legend, one of several he kept after Lincoln was assassinated. There was some sort of commemorative event in Manhattan just after Lincoln died. Hundreds ,maybe thousands, of these flags were hung from window sills of homes and apartment buildings throughout the city. I don't have a precise date, but it shouldn't be difficult to track down.
While there was a large extended family, my grandmother was an only child so she retained the collections. She was married around 1907. I have vague memories of stories of my grandmother being castigated by her family for marrying "down". From letters, I gather her husband was an extremely nice man, but not terribly successful. Finally forced to becoming a itinerate salesman, my grandfather killed himself in 1925. My grandmother (with two kids) hit bottom financially almost immediately. The gun collection was sold off. She kept the flags, but sold off bits and pieces of the coin collection to support the family.
At some point, my grandmother gave my mother the flag collection. They were stored in two large steamer trunks. In 1956, there was a terrible storm which filled our basement with water. The trunks went under and every flag was destroyed save two. You now have one of them.
By and by, my grandmother kept one part of the coin collection until she died. It was a large bag of gold coins. She once told me the coins were the last vestige of her high society family. She didn't trust banks, so she took the bag with her to a nursing home (my mother had a cow over that!). The coins were stolen from her room the day she died in 1969.
ZFC Significant Flag
Sources:
Madaus, Howard M.- Whitney Smith, The American Flag: Two Centuries of Concord and Conflict, VZ Publications, Santa Cruz, 2006.
Mastai, Boleslaw and Marie-Louise D'Otrange, The Stars and The Stripes: The American Flag as Art and as History from the Birth of the republic to the Present, Knopf, New York, 1973.
37 Star Flag - (1867-1877) (U.S.), Flags of the World, 11 November 2011, from: http://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/us-1867.html
U. S. Bunting, Lowell Land Trust.Org, 11 November 2011, from: http://lowelllandtrust.org/greenwayclassroom/history/USBunting.pdf
Image Credits:
Zaricor Flag Collection
