Presentation State Color Flag, 25th Mass. Volunteer Infantry

Presentation Color, 25th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer. Massachusetts State House Battle Flag Collection, 1987.274. Courtesy Commonwealth of Massachusetts, State House Art Commission. Presented by ladies of Worcester Mar 64. Rtn 1866–not listed in AG reports as of 31 Dec 65, present 31 Dec 66. Made by Thomas Savory of Boston (Letter) Blue. Visible side of flag is reverse, obverse shows typical gold Savory eagle, on its chest the Union shield with “25th.” painted over stars in blue chief,
and “REGT. MASS. / VOLS.” across stripes.

Through the courtesy of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, State House Art Commission, I was extremely fortunate to obtain permission to share a rare color slide of the 25th Massachusetts Presentation State Color Flag, presented by the ladies of Worcester in March 1864, just months before Private George W. Gould sacrificed his life at Cold Harbor to save the Union and end human chattel slavery. The flag is beautiful, if in particularly fragmentary condition. I am thrilled to add this additional element to honor the memory of Private Gould.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s