Drew,

Keep in mind a couple things:

1) Polk's Army of Mississippi was a separate entity in Johnston's Army of Tennessee through July 1864 when it was finally changed to the Third Corps. Its cavalry division of William Hicks" Jackson did not answer to Joe Wheeler, cavalry corps commander of the AOT; he answered to Gen. Leonidas Polk, which is why when his division arrived it was always on a different flank.

2) Accordingly, some of their supplies MAY have still come from the depots of Alabama and Mississippi and this MAY include flags. Or they also came from the Atlanta Depot and related.

3) After the fall of Atlanta and when Hood moved north of that city seeking to draw out Sherman for a fight, he was moving away from the Augusta Depot and with Sherman's destruction of the railroads about Atlanta for his March to the Sea and the destruction of railroads on that march, August was cut off for some time. Hood was destroying the Western & Atlantic Railroad on the way so that would cut him off from Augusta.

Hood moved into Alabama and changed his supply base to that state which means that the depots of the state as well as those of Mississippi were tasked with supplying his army. This would include new flags which should then have come from Mobile. However no such invoices for the Belknaps, who made the Mobile Depot flags from October 1863 through July 1864, survive so who knows if they did, or they did and the paper work is lost.

Or the regiment had its own flag made to replace that lost at Allatoona Pass. Either way, this flag has yet to be located.

Related to this flag and that of the 35th Mississippi being retained by the Minnesota veterans, see these newspaper articles that can be found online through the various newspaper web sites:

Duluth New Tribune April 24, 1902
as above March 29, 1902
Newnan (GA) Herald, October 3, 1924
National Tribune July 13, 1905

Greg Biggs