ALBANY, N.Y. | They made it through Shiloh, Antietam and Gettysburg, but many of the Civil War battle flags sitting in the nation's state-owned collections might not survive the budget battles being waged in some statehouses.
Preservation work on deteriorating banners carried in some of the war's bloodiest battles has been eliminated, scaled back or ignored by state budget planners focused on finding money for basics such as education, health care and transportation.
In New York, home to the nation's largest state-owned collection of Civil War battle flags, money for a preservation project is being cut from Gov. David A. Paterson's proposed budget. Indiana's funding for flag conservation has been returned to the state's general fund. Ohio hasn't provided government funding for its 400-plus Civil War battles flags in nearly a decade.
Another recent budget casualty is Pennsylvania's allocation for maintaining the battle flag collection it preserved in the 1980s.
"Thank goodness we did it back then," Ruthann Hubbert-Kemper, executive director of the Pennsylvania Capitol Preservation Committee, said of the project that conserved all of the Keystone State's nearly 400 Civil War battle flags.
The lack of funding for flag preservation could hurt efforts to promote the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.
Battle flags are commonly used in Civil War exhibits, but usually only after lengthy preservation work that can cost tens of thousands of dollars, depending on a banner's size and condition. Staging publicity-generating events using the flags may be more difficult in the run-up to the Civil War sesquicentennial in 2011, advocates say.
"This isn't the time to be cutting this. It's the time to be increasing it because it will be bring in tourism dollars," said Ed Norris of Lancaster, Mass., head of the battle flag preservation committee for the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War.
The total number of battle flags in state-owned collections isn't clear, but it's likely several thousand, only a fraction of which have been preserved. Some have deteriorated into mere fragments and fringe, victims of neglect or exposure to light, heat and humidity.
"Time," Mrs. Hubbert-Kemper said, "is the enemy."
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