Old State House Museum Collections Blog

   

I'd like to send a special thanks to the Minnesota Historical Society for permitting us to use a brief clip from one of their great podcasts concerning flag conservation.  You learn more about MNS here.

In addition to soliciting aid from the public, we are currently in the process of writing a grant proposal to the National Park Service's Save America's Treasures program. The following is an excerpt from our narrative concerning the severity of the threat to flags. (We have also decided to include a third flag in the grant proposal that is not covered in the video, but rest assured, it is fantastic!)

    Each of the three flags submitted in this proposal are in desperate need of professional stabilization. All textiles undergo a natural aging process based upon slowly occurring chemical reactions in the cloth’s fibers. Years of exposure to ultra-violet distorts pigment and speeds up this process, threatening the physical integrity of the fabric itself. The cloth becomes brittle and eventually breaks. This has already occurred to one of the three flags covered in this proposal, the 1868 Centerpoint battle flag. The Centerpoint flag is broken into numerous fragments and extremely fragile. Pieces of the flag are missing including portions that once contained embroidered text. Much of the color has faded from the red and blue fields, resulting in a thirteen bars of a grayish tinge alternating with soiled and oxidized off-white. In short, the flag has degraded to the point that it would require professional textile conservators to even safely unfurl the flag from its rolled storage.
    The other two flags, both Arkansas Civil War battle flags, are scarcely in better condition. In 2009, the Old State House Museum participated in a flag exchange with the Missouri State Museum, repatriating Civil War battle flags to each respective state. Through this exchange, the Old State House received two flags associated with Arkansas regiments – the consolidated 6th and 7th Arkansas Infantry and Hart’s Battery. At some point in the early 20th century, efforts had been made to preserve these two flags to the best of the period’s knowledge and ability. This involved placing each flag under protective black netting which was sewn, quite thoroughly, to a white cloth support. The reverse of each flag is obscured due this cloth backing and may be covering significant details or even further harming the flag beyond what is already apparent. While the netting and cloth backing may have provided some measure of stability, it also has confined dangerous contaminants. These contaminants have undoubtedly exacerbated the degradation of the flags’ pigment and fibers. Both flags have missing fragments. Both have large spots of discolored oxidization which likely resulted from moisture and other dirt and grime collected over time.
    If left in their current state, rolled and covered with possibly acidic materials, the flags will hardly survive another hundred and fifty years, much less be available for exhibition for the upcoming sesquicentennial. These extremely rare and significant artifacts of material culture, Arkansas history, and American military history, will continue to physically dissolve without treatment. With immediate action, we can conserve these objects, their stories, and the invaluable symbolic and historical valuable which is inextricably linked to the physical preservation.

Recently I had the pleasure of conducting a telephone interview with Dr. Brooks Blevins regarding the recent exhibit at the Old State House and his book "Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol' Boys Defined a State." We spoke for about an hour and the resulting audio will be used in a forthcoming podcast. As a teaser for those who have not yet purchased the book or seen the exhibit, here is the Google Books preview embedded below...



I encourage you to come back to the blog and check out the video podcast after it's been posted this next week. And even further, come out to the museum and see the exhibit!

We're gearing up for the Civil War Sesquicentennial and while doing so, we're going through our entire collection of Civil War and Civil War Reunion artifacts to ensure that each artifact has an image. For the past two days, we've been photographing some Civil War reunion related flags. One of the most interesting ones we've come across was a flag made from the material that covered the Arkansas monument at the Shiloh Civil War Battlefield before its unveiling in 1910. We're hoping to prove through research that it was exhibited during the 1911 Little Rock Reunion. You can see the flag in the photograph above.

After photographing the flags, we re-rolled them in new acid free tissue and muslin and then rehung them. Ah, the life of a registrar.

   In 1981, roughly 16,000 architectural drawings by Charles L. Thompson were donated to the Old State House Museum.  Hundreds of Thompson's buildings still stand across the state of Arkansas, and in order to make this resource more accessible, we have spent the last few years digitizing the drawings and making them available online for public viewing.   You can view those drawings and records that are currently available at the following link - eMuseum Thomspon Drawings.  We also accommodate information requests for those drawing not yet online, as well as high resolution scans.  Below is an excerpt from the Old State House Museum page concerning Thompson.

    Charles L. Thompson was born in November 1868, the third of James C. and Henrietta Lightner Thompson's seven children. Charles became a draftsman at an Indiana mill, but, dissatisfied, he decided to seek employment elsewhere.
    On his way home from New Orleans in 1886, Thompson stopped in Little Rock. He chose to stay here, in part, because there were many opportunities for his architectural expertise. Later, he was quoted as saying that he chose Little Rock because it was "the farthest in the wilderness." Thompson began work for Benjamin J. Bartlett; in 1888, he became an architect and full partner in the firm. In 1890, Bartlett left for Mississippi and the firm became known as Charles L. Thompson, Architect and Superintendent. Throughout the next several decades, Thompson worked by himself and with a variety of partners. Many homes in the historic Quapaw Quarter were designed or modified by Thompson or his firm. His work was not limited to central Arkansas. Carnall Hall at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville (ca. 1900), the Newport Jr. and Sr. High School in Newport (ca. 1930), the Monroe County Courthouse in Clarendon (ca. 1911), and the Charles H. Murphy, Sr. House in El Dorado (ca. 1926) are just a few of Thompson's designs located around the state. Charles L. Thompson retired in 1938. After 20 further years of retirement service to his community, he died in 1959 at age 91.

The Walter W. Brown Home, Camden


The A. N. Tanner House, Helena

The Peter Hotze House, Little Rock


For more information on Charles L. Thompson, see F. Hampton Roy's book Charles L. Thompson and Associates: Arkansas Architects, 1885-1938.