It was a remarkable flag, a silken gift crafted by the ladies of Oak Park and Baytown for their young Washington County neighbors marching off in Union Army blue to fates unknown.

It would have snapped smartly in the wintry winds on the high plains of the Dakota Territory. After a three-year, battle-scarred journey across a nation gripped in Civil War, in the spring heat of North Carolina, it would have hung in limp mourning at word of Abraham Lincoln's death.

Now, the battle flag has become Brent Peterson's Holy Grail.

Peterson is executive director of the Washington County Historical Society, and since learning earlier this year of the possible existence of the flag given to Company C of the 8th Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment, he has been on a quest to find it. The trail is cold -- the last mention of the flag is in a 1927 newspaper article -- and it's led him to Washington state, northern Wisconsin and a dusty attic in Bayport.

"This flag is just driving me insane," he said. "Because I know it has to be around here someplace."

Peterson's quest is as much emotional as it is professional.

Yes, he would like to add the flag to the society's Warden's House Museum in Stillwater, seeing as all 94 Company C officers and men were from the county. The museum has an extensive collection of Civil War artifacts from Company C and other units that drew so heavily from the population of Washington County.

But he has also come to know the men of Company C well, men like James Mulvey, the good-humored lumberman who had come from England; Hermann Heiforth, the Prussian who wrote dutifully to his brother in German; William Hamilton, who died in faraway Tennessee, and the company's last two surviving men, John Blake and Horace Voligny, who got this quest rolling.

Trail stays cold

Peterson was helping research a book published this year -- the 150th anniversary of the Civil War's start -- by the Washington County Historical Society called "In Their Own Words: The Civil War as Seen by Washington County Soldiers." It is a collection of firsthand accounts and letters.

Old newspaper stories describe how local women gave Company C its flag as the soldiers departed, noting it cost $70. "That's a lot of money for 1862," Peterson said.

It next appears in historical records in 1905, the 40th anniversary of the war's end, at the first reunion of Company C survivors, a club later known as the "Last Two Men's Club." They met at Voligny's Keystone House, a Stillwater hotel.

At that first meeting -- under the same flag -- a bottle of wine was bought to be saved for the last two men. Mulvey entertained the crowd, telling how he had revisited old battle sites and had talked to an aging veteran of the Confederacy.

By 1927, it was down to Blake and Voligny, who cracked open the bottle and drank their long-awaited toast. Blake died the next year, Voligny in 1931.

"But what happened to that flag?" Peterson said.

He knew the Minnesota Historical Society has a collection of Civil War unit flags. "So of course I bothered the hell out of them," he said. "They know I can be quite a pest."

No luck. Same with the military museum at Fort Ripley.

"Stillwater has the second-oldest armory in Minnesota," Peterson said. "They do not have it."

Next, he tracked down Mike Voligny, Horace Voligny's great-grandson, who lives in Anoka County's Linwood Township. Mike's father, Henry, lived in Bayport (formerly Baytown). Did he have the flag?

"I wish I did," said Mike Voligny, who is tantalized by the mystery. "I talked to my brother, but neither he nor I ever heard about it. It was news to us."

Mike Voligny said his father was the youngest of three brothers, the other two having moved to Everett, Wash. He speculates one of the older sons would have been given the flag, but no one else in the family seems to know where it could have ended up.

It could have been given to an American Legion Post or been destroyed, he said. Peterson put out a public plea in Everett but has drawn no leads.

Horace Voligny's venerable old home in Bayport, the one where the "Last Two Men's Club" last met, is in foreclosure and on the market. After some persistent requests, Peterson was allowed to look in the attic.

"It was a long, long, long shot," Peterson said. But after an hour of checking for hollow walls and knocking on floor boards, "All I found was dirt."

Peterson is now trying to determine if the flag actually ended up with the family of Blake, the second-to-the-last man. He died in Mellen, Wis., in Ashland County.

Well-traveled unit

Blake and Voligny were part of the most well-traveled unit of the Union Army, Peterson said. The 8th Minnesota was formed in late 1862, when the Union Army was put on its heels by early Confederate victories. The companies, A through K, were divided by county.

But just as the regiment was poised to head east, the Dakota Conflict erupted in southwestern Minnesota. With the state thrown into panic, the troops were diverted to quell the Indians.

The panic soon gave way to rage, and the 8th Infantry was part of a punitive force sent to the Dakota Territory (now North and South Dakota and parts of Montana and Wyoming), where they fought in several battles and were stationed at Fort Abercrombie.

By 1864, they traveled south, joining the Army of the Cumberland and serving in Tennessee and North Carolina, ending the war with the occupation of Raleigh. The 8th was known as the "Indian Regiment" because of its experience in the Dakota Territory.

The flag is important to Peterson because of the county's role in the Civil War which, in turn, was a pivotal historical event for Minnesota.

"When you think about it, Minnesota was just a baby state," he said, just admitted to the Union in 1858. "Minnesota got its identity, its early identity, from its heavy involvement in the Civil War, because that's when we really became a part of the Union."

Jim Anderson • 651-735-0999