Spread over a table in the Colton Hall Museum, inhabiting a sizable portion of the room, is a red, white and blue flag with the stars and stripes.
Only this flag has 26 stars. Its fabric is shredded throughout, and creases line the stripes, a result of being folded up and stored in an archival box for decades.
Brian Edwards gingerly lifts a corner of the 8-by-12-foot flag to show the stitching.
“It’s very delicate,” he says.
It may be delicate now, but what it was used for during its time was anything but.
In 1846, U.S. Army Captain John C. Fremont and his regiment climbed Gavilan Peak (now Fremont Peak) near San Juan Bautista, overlooking the Salinas Valley and the Monterey Bay. Tensions between the United States and Mexico were high, although Fremont was granted permission by Mexican authorities to map a route west through Mexican-controlled California.
But Fremont was only permitted to travel through the San Joaquin Valley, not the Salinas Valley. When word reached Mexican Commander Jose Castro, he viewed Fremont’s expedition to the peak as a threat and ordered his regiment to leave California. Fremont and his men ignored the order, and instead built a camp on the peak and flew the American flag, a provocative move that led to a three-day standoff. Mexico and the United States eventually went to war two months later.
That flag, donated to the City of Monterey in 1948, is part of a display of historic flags and other artifacts at the Colton Hall Museum as part of celebrations of the United States’ 250th anniversary.
“It’s the perfect time to put them in public view,” says Edwards, Monterey’s library and museums director.
That includes a small slice of the last Mexican flag flown at Custom House in Monterey in 1846, taken down before U.S. Navy Commodore John Sloat’s warships landed in Monterey. Don Jose Vallejo took possession of the flag that year and brought it to his home at Mission San Jose, and the story goes that his children used it to cover a playhouse until the red color had nearly faded away. The red strip of fabric, with its frayed edges, is surrounded in a case by letters, including a 1961 handwritten note by Samuel Pearson donating it to the City of Monterey and a typewritten response by Colton Hall curator Pauline McCleary thanking Pearson.
There’s also a Mexican flag from 1823-1846 that’s on loan from the Monterey History and Art Association and a 31-star constellation flag from 1850 that recognizes California becoming the 31st state.
“It’s pieces of history where in very few places you will see something like this,” Edwards says.
Replica flags that are significant in Monterey’s history, flags that fly at the downtown Simoneau Plaza, and a watercolor painting of the bear “Samson” by Charles Nahl that forms the basis of the current California flag, round out the exhibit.
Throughout Monterey’s history, there are many examples of small groups of people making major impacts in the history of the United States that’s helped lead the country to where it is today, Edwards notes.
“I think people underestimate the role of Monterey in the history of California and the history of America as well,” he says.
The flags will be on exhibit through July 31, and in the instance of Fremont’s flag, it’s a rare opportunity to see it out of storage. To have it on display permanently requires it to be in a carefully controlled environment.
It had been 180 years since the flag was at Gavilan Peak, until recently. Edwards, on a trek through Fremont Peak State Park with his son and nephew, carried the flag in a box (“Very cautiously,” he adds) to a monument commemorating Fremont’s expedition.
It was the first time the flag had been carried through the same grounds as that defiant expedition had done nearly two centuries prior. The magnitude of the moment was not lost on the group, Edwards says.
OLD FLAGS OF MONTEREY. On display daily 10am-4pm through July 31. Colton Hall Museum, 570 Pacific St., Monterey. (831) 646-3933, monterey.gov/library