While cleaning for their annual fair, among the cobwebs and dust, community members in Waseca County, Minnesota, spotted an enormous parcel wrapped in oil cloth tucked into the eaves of a historic cabin on display inside a fairgrounds hall.
“What’s that?” the county commissioner asked the other volunteers.
The item was carefully taken down and unwrapped, revealing 13 vast swaths of red and white fabric, each nearly a foot and a half wide.
Long hidden and forgotten, the strips had been sewn into stripes and paired with a star-studded blue field, now revealing a US flag so large it could not be fully unfurled without touching the ground.
Bit by bit, members of the Waseca County Historical Society are learning more about this patriotic artifact with methodical research. Now, history sleuths in Minnesota are trying to find out where it came from, who made it and what should happen to it.
