Collectible US 'Stars and Stripes' will dominate this October online auction

 

Forget red, orange and brown. The colours of fall are red, white and blue at the October 1 Case Antiques Auction, as an important patriotic Americana and flag collection headlines the sale.

The 700-lot auction also includes American and European fine art and decorative arts, Asian antiques, and Southern regional material. It will take place at the company's gallery in Knoxville, Tennessee, with Internet live bidding also available.

The Americana collection, which comprises a significant portion of the sale, comes from the estate of A. Welling LaGrone Jr. of Nashville.

LaGrone was a businessman, arts patron and veteran who expressed his love of state and country through historic memorabilia, documents, decorative arts, military items, folk art and fine art, and in particular, flags.

 


A. Welling LaGrone Jr's collection included a number of historic flags

His vexillogical collection includes an early design Confederate national flag, an ensign captured from a Confederate blockade runner in 1862, a fragment from the Smithsonian-owned flag known as "Old Glory," a 16-star American ship's flag, numerous 19th and early 20th century sewn and parade flags, and, perhaps most intriguingly, the flag from "The Red White and Blue."

The Red White and Blue was a lifeboat which made headlines in 1866 when it became the smallest ship ever to cross the Atlantic Ocean.

That flag, repurposed from a Union picket boat, the S.S. Flambeau, is also accompanied by the captain's log and archive surrounding its journey - a journey that ended at the 1867 Paris Exhibition. A Currier and Ives print of the boat, its crew and flag is also included in the lot.

 


An early 19th-century folk art painted regimental drum

"It's rare to see such an intact cache of material associated with a single voyage survive like this," said company president John Case. "And it touches several areas of collecting: Civil War, flags, and maritime history."

Other items in the LaGrone collection include an early 19th-century folk art painted regimental drum, an Andrew Jackson campaign lantern and signed War of 1812 document, and a rare Secession era palmetto badge.

Also for sale is an 1862 Confederate seal medallion struck in copper, an Andrew Johnson impeachment ticket, a rare Davy Crockett lithographed image and signature, numerous Civil War and other historical prints.


 

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