(cool music) - It's funny and interesting how memories are forgotten and then recovered that you find things in curious places.

Sometimes it really just takes one person shifting in the milieu of the town.

That is often how history gets forgotten and lost.

(cool music) - In the annex to the town hall known as the Burnside Memorial building.

In a case, they had a a collection of historic flags that were wrapped around the original flag pole covered in plastic and kind of stored there for many decades.

We assumed that these flags were civil war related.

Burnside at one point was head of the ninth core of the Union Army which is a significant section of the Union Army.

And the headquarters flag for that unit was missing.

No one knows where it exists today.

So we had the hope that this was Burnside's headquarters flag when he was commander of the ninth core in the Union Army.

That was my hope going into this thing.

- There's a three pane window.

Beautiful light shining into this room and this case that they custom built for these flags to be put into.

I guess in the 1980s sometime, someone had seen the flags that were just on their poles hanging in this case and said, "Oh, those are falling apart "we should do something about that."

So we'll roll them up and hopefully that will give us more time to think about what to do.

So I said, "If we're going to unroll these flags "we should do it the one time, the last time."

If we're going to conserve them, if we're going to take care of them and look at what look at them and see what they are.

What happens when you roll something around a pole is it gets used to being in that shape.

In order to counteract that, I decided to humidify them.

We created a humidity tent to go over the flags and raise the humidity of the flags.

I think between 50 and 60% for about a week - I was invited by Patrick to come and look at some flags that were on loan from Bristol and was pretty excited about the potential what could be in that pile of flags.

I always have to anticipate the unanticipated so that I've been doing this long enough to know that when you get into these things, the artifact is gonna tell you what it is.

So all the guessing and all the speculating won't put you onto what you're actually gonna see.

- And I remember getting underneath the plastic on each one of these and it wasn't until I got to the last one that I kind of had a huh moment.

And I remember Patrick saying, "What's huh?

"What's that mean?"

And I said, "It's not weighted silk."

And they said, "What does that mean?"

And I said, "It's a twill weave silk fabric.

"It's older than these other flags."

And they're like, "How much older?"

I don't know.

- And so we start to infer this gold colored flag and we're all standing there watching and we're waiting, you know you expecting a flag that there's gonna be something embroidered on it or painted on it, some sort of symbol or words.

- Is there going to be a picture in the middle?

Is there going to be painting on it?

Is there going to be letters?

Is there going to be a Canton?

is, is, is?

- There was nothing.

It was just plain gold colored.

And we all just stared at it not saying a word and I felt, honestly I felt a little let down 'cause I'm thinking, "How are we gonna figure out what this is?"

If there's nothing on it, it must not really be anything important.

Was kind of the feeling that I had.

- There were painted design or something on the other side, you'd see it.

I mean, this is how it was supposed to be flown facing this way.

- Just kind of unique without having a unit designation or some sort of emblem But it is what it is.

There's a purpose for it.

It's just I was expecting to see a crest or some identification on there.

- Is the flag original?

How do I tell these things?

Was it always this color?

Why do you just have a plain flag?

Why would it be in the Bristols town hall so remembered and so taken care of if it didn't have a history?

There's just so many questions that went into, what is this and is it real?

And I had just a lot of experts asking me to just be able to tell them these things.

- It's funny enough that we didn't really look at the finiol until it was going through the humidification process.

And we looked at it closely, immediately noticed there was writing on it.

We took photographs.

It a three-sided spear and on each side of that spear is engraved with a little short message.

One of the messages, "For Bristol for the time being 1724."

Another side says, "Captain Nathaniel Byfield 1687."

And then on the third side it says, "Gift for first company of militia, "Colonel Nathaniel Byfield," I believe is written on there.

- Everything is saying that this flag has been on this pole since the 1600s since it was made.

That everything is saying that this flag was made to be like this.

- You can tell that it just was beyond reproach, the materials, the methods of manufacturer, the weave, everything kind of worked together to tell you the same story that the history itself was telling you on the inscription.

- It really kind of jump started our research and focused our efforts to try to understand who did this flag belong to?

When did it come into existence?

How was it used?

These sorts of questions thankfully because of that finiol - I think this might be one of the earliest if not the earliest American colony flags to be discovered.

And the condition is remarkable.

Having the original flag staff with the presentation which is an artifact in its own right versus the flag in its current condition it's just impressive.

It really is impressive piece.

(cool music) - When you do research on a subject or especially people, it's like opening a window into their soul.

No matter how much research you do you only find a little bit of what you're looking for.

- So Nathaniel Byfield is definitely an interesting character when you research him and just look at the the things that are immediately available to the common person who's just doing a Google Search.

There's a lot big focus on his judicial career.

- He's sort of like the colonial period's most famous unknown.

His name is here.

His name is there.

He, yeah, it pops up all over the place.

He was born in Long Ditton, Surrey, England.

He was the youngest of 21 children.

I think, knowing that he was the youngest of 21 children clues you into the personality that he grew up into.

Byfield he set out to get what he wanted and made sure he did.

- I think Byfield speaks to the type of man who did well in early America which is somebody who is capable of thinking on their feet.

Very industrious makes connections between people.

It's an opportunity for a man who is has imagination and the skills, the sort of what we might call today, soft skills to back it up.

- So he invests after King Phillips War.

He invests money to purchase this area called Mount Hope.

The four proprietors came from Boston and they bought from Plymouth Colony the lands that are formerly owned by the Pookeenokile tribe.

And so which was basically the entire Bristol peninsula.

They bought it from the colony of Plymouth.

Think that their plan really was to found a town and kind of sell the town if you will.

Think they really are thinking very contemporary ideas of city planning, town planning, urban planning.

- There's very little in the record about his military career as a captain and later as a colonel of the militia.

The Bristol County Militia was formed shortly after Bristol County formed 1685.

And initially the famous King Phillips War fighter, Benjamin Church was the colonel of that Militia.

And Nathaniel Byfield served under Benjamin Church.

And it was in the late 1690s that Nathaniel Byfield became the colonel.

- Typically and according to law, all the militia units that were raised in New England had to be basically outfitted by the locals.

And so it was up to the leader of the group, which would be the colonel this case, in this size unit.

He would be required to pay out of his own pocket for things like flags, musical instruments, and officers uniforms.

And generally that's why many of the colonial militias were led by leaders of the colony.

The people who had the wealth and people who had the status and that's why they were asked to pay for it.

- In long and behold we found a period reference which states that Colonel Nathaniel Byfield purchased a handsome stand of colors for his unit.

So, that I think anchors the flag to that time period when he becomes a colonel.

We also learned too that the militia organization system that was in vogue at that time dictated a plain silk banner for the colonel's company.

- This system of flags which is commonly called the vent system which is named after a military officer in England who devised the flags for Cromwell.

This system came over with the settlers starting in 1630s.

The flags themselves were so clear that if you needed to reorganize your company and figure out where the colonel was, the colonel's flag stood out as being just a plain flag with no emblems on it whatsoever and you knew where you had to maneuver your troops to rally to that color.

- And that's exactly what we have in the Byfield flag.

It's a plain silk banner and we've found evidence that it was once red.

There's still flakes of red that you can see in the edges of the flag, inside the hoist edge where the flag pole would go in.

You can see elements of red there in the tassels there's bits of red.

- We are fairly confident that the color of the flag was dyed with cochineal red.

We took samples and we sent that off to the Smithsonian.

They have this wonderful conservation department in the Smithsonian.

Those test results will tell us with the fabric that they had, the dying process they used, the dyes that they used.

It's basically just validating what we know to be true that this flag was created in the late 1600s and they were using the same methods that were used in that time period for a scarlet color, for a flag of that kind.

- The colonel's color belonged to the colonel quite literally.

He paid for it and he could do whatever he wanted with it.

And if he was done being Colonel of the regimen, they generally would take them with them.

- Well, there's always the possibility he forgot it but I don't think he's the type of person that forgot anything at all.

And well, it's probably left as a remembrance or he left it to the company.

- I think it's important that whether he thought he was doing anything important or not, I don't think he did.

But he passed that flag on so that it would fall into a place where it'd be preserved.

- Well, according to Monroe, his health was beginning to fail.

And so he moved back to Boston and he ends up actually dying on June the sixth, 1733.

- And when you, again when you research the Bristol Phoenix Newspaper and you do a search on the Byfield flag, you'll find many references throughout the last couple of centuries where it refers to the Nathaniel Byfield flag.

It refers to it as a flag from the ancient Indian war period and it's carried at the head of the Bristol 4th of July parade the famous oldest parade in the country, 4th of July.

So it's an interesting relic of kind of an early American patriotism - A flag that may have been intended strictly for utilitarian purposes, such as these militia colors can take on the added aura you might say over time.

And exactly in that manner, I mean, the colonel bequest is like to the town, eventually in the town said, "This is the flag of our founder."

And it becomes something more of a relic than a utilitarian item.

And over time, people can see more things in that flag than were ever intended to be there.

- The bicentennial was a critical moment in Bristol's history and I could certainly see how the flag in that moment might have been determined almost too special to be in front of the parade anymore.

Too fragile, too important.

Somebody made that decision.

It got put away and then again, it only takes the turnover of one or two people to forget that it's there.

- So there's a lot of artifacts that have just disintegrate have been either just through time and age and where and not even knowing what they are.

The discovery of this flag is amazing.

It could have been simply just lost in time.

But the fact that it wasn't and the fact that it took those professionals and those curators to realize maybe this is something significant, let's figure it out.

- After talking to Fonda Thompson who is the woman that conserved this star-spangled banner, I decided that the best way to conserve the flag for a long period of time so that it would be around for generations to come was to mount it flat.

It's under the least amount of stress.

It's just under its own weight but the flag is not in perfect condition.

It's got some damage to it.

The first thing that you do when you get an object like this, after you've analyzed it, is you're gonna vacuum it.

You wanna make sure that all of the sharp particulates are off of your flag and can't do any damage to it.

You want it to be as clean as possible so that any evidence that you get from it after that are definitely not a contaminant from your area or from where it was stored previously, it's hard evidence.

But then you've gotta also flip the flag in order to do the other side of the flag, which is a nail biting experience.

Especially if you have to do it multiple times because if you have the right side of the flag facing up to begin with, you flip it, now you're on the wrong side and you have to flip it back the other way to be on the right side.

Then you have to, I'm gonna say reorganize the flag back to the way that it was originally.

The issue is there's a damaged area so we need to put Humpty Dumpty back together again and get all of those pieces to wanna align where they were originally when that wasn't a broken area.

In order to do that, I do a humidification method.

You work in a smaller area and I was able to line up the pieces as they should be.

You humidify just that area that you're gonna work with or be able to finish working with.

I need to let it sit for about 10 minutes to allow the humidity to absorb into the material and then I can put glass weights on the flag and allow that to iron the fabric with this cool temperature, humidity method and then let it dry with that weight keeping it flat.

And then when it's dried, it will have the memory of being flat.

The last and most scary moment of this entire process was moving the flag from the board.

I had been working on to its final mount.

I had to roll up the Byfield flag on a larger role as safely as I possibly could, keeping all the little bits as together as I possibly can and move that from the board that it was on to its final resting place.

And you only get one shot.

There's no second chances.

So you lay it and that's it.

By some grace of skill and miracle, it ended up in the perfect position.

- Feels good.

(cool music) - In order to keep anything from falling off I decided to put a silk clipping cover over the top of the flag.

So that evolved into, we'll need to get a reading of the exact color of the flag.

And then from that find out what dyes will go into making that exact color.

And then we can get an exact color match so that the flag and the silk crane look exactly the same.

And when you look at it visually it won't be obtrusive to the viewer.

And that's the kind of goal of conservation is to stabilize objects without making the stabilization obtrusive to the viewer.

Trying to gently comb all that fringe down and just pulling out anything that's not attached anymore because leaving it there isn't helping anything, roughly speaking though it took about an hour to do.

And in doing that, I was actually able to find areas of red that had been noded together where the fringe had noded with itself.

So it was very exciting going through that and still finding all of those places and all of those pieces of history.

Mount was made, the flag was attached, the crap line was placed on top of that, the fringe was stitched down and then it was placed in its case where it's currently residing.

(cool music) - So again, our research puts this flag in the late 1690s which would make this the oldest complete flag in the Western hemisphere today.

- So the Byfield flag is a complete flag which is somewhat unusual for something that old.

We do have some flag fragments from the early 1700s but this is besides being a little older than that.

It's certainly one of the most complete flags that we know.

Af flag like this for a person who knows something about the era and the organization of militia and things like that, it's real clear what it is.

We don't have any doubt.

It's written history is very good.

It speaks for it very well.

It's the right size, the right shape, the right color the right design.

I mean, everything about it is right.

And that they carved on the finiol.

That would be the exactly in the era that you would find a flag like this.

The fact that it's associated with a colonel of a militia regimen, that's the colonel's flag.

There's no question about it.

The whole thing when you add it up adds together.

- And it had been forgotten.

It had been lost.

The town had forgotten that this flag exists.

So we're very fortunate to have made this connection with the town together, to do the research, to verify what it was, and to go through this long conservation project.

And now we're gonna be able to share it with the world.

In fact, we're partnering with the National Museum of the U.S Army and they're gonna be putting the flag on display in 2026 for the 250th anniversary of our country.

- Yes, I do believe this flag is a national treasure because it is a direct link in terms of our military history.

My job now is to interpret and present it to the American public.

So it doesn't get lost.

Doesn't just remain sort of a local type of symbol but it becomes a national symbol because of the story it has to tell - Flags have been used by human beings for thousands of years.

The concept of flag usage is so ingrained in the human soul that through the course of time, whenever there's a group of people trying to identify themselves, one of the first things they do is they design and a hoist of flag.

Understanding flag usage is important because it tells us a lot about the culture of the people that are using those flags and that usage changes over time.

Understanding those changes, you can understand how cultures are evolving into a different place.

- I think we can come at this moment in Bristol's history with a a more sophisticated understanding of what it really meant for really New England at large.

Bristol is one of the first towns founded after King Phillips War when the dynamic is really changing.

And you can make a case for King Phillips War really being a pivotal moment in American history.

And Bristol's founded right at that pivotal moment.

- You go through the research and you learn, this is a new period in American history.

It's unfamiliar to me, to be honest.

And I think for most Americans, they know very little about the colonies in the 17th century.

You come in with a modern eye in recent history and you view an object that's from that far in the distant past.

And whatever way of thinking about an object because the way you look at things in a modern sense, it doesn't necessarily apply.

That's not the reality.

It's not the truth of the object that you're looking at.

- Every piece speaks in a way that says, "This is how I wanna represent myself."

Not only of how it would've been viewed at the time period but how it was then viewed after he gifted it to the town of Bristol says something about him, how he wanted himself to be viewed, how he wanted his legacy to be portrayed and represented.

- Well, I think that it's really speaks to why preserving the material culture is so important because it does become emblematic of Byfield.

The flag comes to represent Byfield and its contribution to the town.

It sort of embeds itself.

What we love and know about Byfield sort of moves over to the flag.

And so preserving the flag in that context becomes like preserving a piece of Byfield.

Flag itself as a material object is incredibly exciting.

And I would challenge anybody to go and look at that flag and not get a charge of how important it is.

The actual material objects matter.

The real thing matters.

- Having that material culture is such a huge piece.

I can't properly convey how important it is to have textiles from the late 1600s that have survived to now.

It's incredibly important.

- It's been a journey of discovery.

I'm very proud of the role that our little museum has in preserving important history that has a national significance like the Byfield flag does.

There's a lot of important history out there that it's gonna be lost if we don't do something about it.

If we don't make the effort - In America, particularly in the United States, there are treasures hidden away in every corner.

And as time goes on, I have been amazed as to what treasures have come to light and what we can make of them.

It's likely the oldest known existing flag in what was then British North America.

It's just a unique treasure of history and who knows what we're gonna find next?

- It's not every day you find a priceless piece of history in a closet.

(cool music)