History Rediscovered

On December 4th, 2017, Camille, Morgan, Courtney and Gretta traveled to Annapolis, MD, to spend the week at the United State Naval Academy Museum. Our work took place in Mahan Hall, which is home to 41 cases of trophy flags captured by the US Navy dating from as early as the War of 1812. The collection was restored in its entirety in 1912-1913 by Amelia Fowler and her team of 50 women, which is the only reason it was stable enough to withstand more than 100 years of continuous display in less-than-ideal conditions. The big question prior to beginning work was the number of flags in the five cases we were there to work on. Sixteen flags were visible in the front of the cases, however we suspected there might be an additional forty-five flags from a 1913 exhibit still hanging behind the visible flags.

The glass partially removed from Case 28 in Mahan Hall.

On Monday morning we flew to Baltimore and headed from the airport to the campus of the United States Naval Academy. After being cleared to enter the yard, we were given a tour of the museum and its storage areas. We then made our way over to Mahan Hall, where the trophy flags were displayed and where we would be working. Since the glass was still up in the display cases preventing us from accessing the flags, we were only able to set up our work space on the stage in the auditorium. We then headed into beautiful downtown Annapolis for some well deserved barbecue before heading to our hotel to rest up for the next day.

On Tuesday morning, we headed back to the Naval Academy to watch the glass cutters begin work on Case 28. They started by drilling out a 3-inch circle near the top, and then carefully cut and removed the remaining glass in pieces. By 1:30 pm the glass was down and we could begin removing flags from the case. The British flags we could see were tacked to a large wooden arch, which was shimmed into place at the bottom of the case. With the help of museum Managing Director/Supervisory Museum Curator Charles Swift the shims were removed, the arch was tipped forward out of the case, and we could begin removing the tacks. 

Camille Myers Breeze looks at the Spanish flags that have been hidden in Case 28 behind the flags shown above since the 1930's.

As soon as the arch was tipped forward, we could see that there was indeed a second layer of flags hanging on the back of the case. As expected, we found ten Spanish flags put on display in 1913, which  had been hidden from public view since around 1920. Our scope of work for the week immediately switched to Plan B: deinstall only as many flags as we could safely document, surface clean, pack, and transport to the museum's storage facility during the course of the week. 

Courtney Jason (right) and Gretta Hempelmann (left) remove loose mounting threads from the Ensign of the British schooner Lady Prevost.

With the British flags free of their wooden arches, Courtney and Gretta got to work in the adjacent auditorium taking initial photographs and confirmed measurements. Camille Myers Breeze consulted with museum staff and made the decision to remove modern ropes that had been sewn to each flag in 1913 when they were briefly suspended from the ceiling of the auditorium. The majority of our time was spent vacuuming the flags to reduce pollutants before rolling them on themselves with interleaving tissue and wrapping them for the short term in polyethylene sheeting.

Meanwhile Morgan Carbone took charge of documenting, deinstalling, and rehousing the smaller flags found at the back of three cases. She was helped by Charles Swift and his coworkers Senior Curator Tracie Logan and Exhibit Specialist Bill Rogers. By Thursday afternoon we had completed cases 28 and 29 and were ready to tackle case 32. It contained the British Royal Standard captured on April 27, 1813 from the Parliament House in York, Canada, now Toronto. 

Preparing to remove the Royal Standard from its display case.

It took 8 people, including two midshipmen and a professor, to lift the flag on its wooden arch out of the case and over the brass railing to clean plastic on the floor. The tacks were removed from the perimeter and the wood lifted off of the flag. Even without the wood frame, the flag weighed approximately 200 pounds with all of the linen support fabric and ropes attached by Mrs. Fowler in 1913. Measuring 24 by 29 feet, it is also by far the largest flag ever treated by Museum Textile Services. The picture below shows only one third of the flag, with the crest in its center. Camille, Gretta and Courtney finished vacuuming and rolling of the Royal Standard Friday afternoon, which was a timely pinnacle to our trip. ​

The crest from the center of the Royal Standard.

Amelia Fowler marked the back of each of the flags she and her team restored.

By the end of the week, the combined team had deinstalled and relocated a total of 35 trophy flags from Mahan Hall to the adjacent museum building. We will be headed back to the Naval Academy in early 2018 to work on the final two cases in this phase of the project. We will also begin more in-depth conservation of certain flags chosen by the museum for future exhibition. Stay tuned for more blogs about the 1913 restoration of the trophy flag collection, as well as our research and treatments.
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Courtney Jason has worked with MTS since 2010. Since then, Courtney has been a key player in many of our most important projects, with her specialties in tapestry, flags, and large-scale mounting. Courtney completed her ALM in Museum Studies at Harvard Extension School in 2017.