Civil War battle flags on display in the rotunda of the Minnesota State Capitol, ca. 1970.

Civil War battle flags and drums in storage inside the Minnesota State Capitol Rotunda, ca. 1960.

Minnesota veterans gather with historic flags at the state’s second state capitol as they prepare to formally parade the flags to the third state capitol. The state’s Confederate flags were intentionally excluded from this ceremony.

A photograph by Truman Ward Ingersoll of a portion of the 1886 Gettysburg Panorama in St. Paul. The painting depicts Pickett’s Charge on July 3, 1863. Note the Union soldiers in the lower-right corner carrying what appears to be a Confederate flag.

Program for the Battle of Gettysburg Panorama, a fifty-foot-tall, circular, hyper-realistic painting of the battle. The exhibition opened in downtown St. Paul in 1886 at 6th and St. Peter Streets and featured the 28th Virginia battle flag as a prop. 53-4316, Pamphlets Collection, Wisconsin Historical Society Library, Madison.

A flag staff made from the staffs of the First Minnesota and Twenty-eighth Virginia regiments’ battle flags, used in the Battle of Gettysburg, secured together with a strap from a knapsack. 2007.84.23.1.B, 3D Objects Collection, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul.

Color sergeant William N. Irvine holding the tattered remains of the First Minnesota flag shortly after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.

Marshall Sherman photographed standing in front of the Twenty-eighth Virginia battle flag in Joel E. Whitney’s St. Paul studio in 1864, the same year he received a Medal of Honor for his bravery on the battlefield at Gettysburg.

Lucius F. Hubbard (seated at left) with other members of the Fifth Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment: Lt. Col. William B. Gere, Thomas P. Gere, and William B. McGrorty. The photograph was taken in 1862, after the Battle of Corinth.