Two years ago, a bit of buried treasure was discovered at Fort Sisseton Historic State Park: the last flag to fly over the fort the before it was decommissioned 125 years ago. Now a conservator and a group of volunteers are working to make sure this piece of history lasts for another 125.
Treasure can come in all kinds of packages. In this case, it came in a one foot by two foot box in the attic of the officer’s quarters at Fort Sisseton Historic State Park.
Katie Ceroll is the Northeast Regional Supervisor for the Game Fish and Parks Division of Parks and Recreation.
“After I opened the box, you know, my heart jumped,” Ceroll says. “Because that’s not something you go through every day. You don’t handle these items. You leave them in archival storage unless there’s a reason to get them out.”
What she found inside was a flag. A really old flag. A flag with only 38 stars. Fort Sisseton was in operation from 1864 to 1889, before being handed over to the newly formed State of South Dakota. Ceroll says research confirms this flag was the last one to fly over the fort while it was in operation, 125 years ago. She says it belonged to a family for many years, passed down through generations, until being donated back to the fort.
“What they did is, they’d bring it out for special events,” Ceroll says. “If you go back, you look at like 1984, they brought it out, people could see it then, but it always went back into storage. And so when we’re turning 150 we really were looking for something that would be significant to do, but also something with longevity, a project that would be longstanding.”
And Ceroll wondered if restoring the flag might be just the project she was looking for. Around the time the flag was discovered, conservator Terri Schindel was at the fort leading a collections and care workshop.
“Well, I’ve worked on a lot of flags before so the first thought I had, oh my gosh this is huge, this is a lot of work is what I thought first,” Schindel says. But I also was excited that they found the flag, the last flag that flew before it was decommissioned, so I was excited with everybody else.”
After two years of gathering grants and donations Schindel is now back at the fort, leading a group ofvolunteers in the conservation process. The flag was originally 20 feet by ten feet, but about three feet were removed at some point in time, perhaps because of damage. It’s a delicate process, handling fabric this old.
“We started out doing the documentation,” Schindel says. “And we’re going to continue that, before, after, photographs, written documentation, we’re graphing it as we go. Then we surface cleaned which was low vacuum suction front and back. And then we started the humidification very slowly. And as we do that the creases relax.”
As the flag was unfolded and Schindel began to piece the tattered parts together, she noticed something strange about the stars section. There are actually parts of two flags here.
“It looks to me like they used an older one to repair an area of the newer one,” Schindel says. “We’re not exactly sure but this is what it looked like, it was fairly degraded in the blue area and the stars did not align at all. You can see the stars are cut off. It turns out that when we looked at that area closely, it’s a complete insert. There’s a big area that’s totally missing. And to repair that they inserted another flag.”
So what’s the story with that section of the flag? Schindel says it’s a mystery, and she’s looking for clues.
“So on this one, which we’re calling the insert, has nine little stitches per inch,” Schindel says. “This one is stitched finer. It has seven stitches per inch. So in contrasting and comparing this with the original we’re hoping to discover why this is even here.”
And the public can watch Schindel and the volunteers search for those clues six days a week through the end of this month at the fort. Regional Supervisor Katie Ceroll says normally a project like this might be done in a conservation lab. But she says the fact that the public gets to see the process is one of the things that makes this project so special.
“And we’re bringing in community volunteers to be able to be part of that process in helping,” Ceroll says. “And it’s nice because it makes the project have longevity. So even though we’re doing the conservation the month of June, the memories and bonds and people’s experiences are going to have longevity long past that with the community being part of the project.”
Ceroll says by this time next year, visitors can see the flag on permanent display.