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Off Beat: Tall tales recall the raising of first fort flag

Stars and stripes flew from atop a tall tree trimmed of branches

By Tom Vogt, Columbian Science, Military & History Reporter
Published: June 5, 2017, 6:00am

It took two years of preparation before the community raised its new American flag Monday over Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.

Things moved a lot faster the first time officials took on the task of showing the flag here.

Back in 1849, they might have had a kid climb a tree. A really tall tree.

The details are fuzzy after 168 years, but the tale of the first improvised flagpole at Fort Vancouver has consistencies.

One reliable account was penned by the late Ted Van Arsdol, an author and longtime Columbian reporter.

“In May 1849, Lt. James Fry was present for what was probably Vancouver’s first raising of an American flag. The lieutenant, later Army provost marshal, wrote: ‘We established our camp on a ridge in the edge of the wood; by great labor trimmed all the branches from a straight fir tree more than 100 feet high, fixed a pulley to the top and hoisted the stars and stripes,'” Van Arsdol wrote in a 1994 Columbian article.

Just who was assigned to tree-top detail has been lost to history. Royce Pollard, former Vancouver Barracks commander, said he’d heard the local lore about a soldier ascending the trunk. When he was high enough so the flag would be visible and the tree was still sturdy enough to withstand gorge winds, “He topped it off,” said Pollard, six-term mayor of Vancouver.

Another account in our files describes how Major John S. Hatheway “sent a 14 year-old drummer boy up the tree with a rope and pulley, which the boy tied to the treetop.”

Now that Vancouver Barracks is under National Park Service management, and other agencies will be moving in, the new flagpole will be multi-tasking.

“All federal agencies have a requirement for a flagpole,” said Bob Cromwell, chief of interpretation at Fort Vancouver.

As new tenants move in, “That will be the flagpole for all the agencies,” Cromwell said.

Without the 80-footer that was dedicated on Monday, “They would all have different flagpoles.”


Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story

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Columbian Science, Military & History Reporter