Flagpole honors Uncle Sam’s 150th birthday
Uncle Sam’s gravesite, located at Oakwood Cemetery in Troy, N.Y., has a new 40-foot flagpole and a fresh American flag to go with it, thanks to a windstorm and Gettysburg Flag Works of East Greenbush. The installation is perfectly timed: 2016 marks the 150th anniversary of Uncle Sam’s birth.
Oakwood describes itself as “one of America’s largest rural cemeteries” and “the final resting place of many of the area’s most prominent citizens, including [the] progenitor of the famous Uncle Sam icon.”
Others interred there include General George Thomas, known during the Civil War as “the rock of Chickamauga” for his key victory in Tennessee. Although born in Virginia, Thomas fought for the North, and President Ulysses S. Grant attended his funeral service at Oakwood in 1870.
Thomas was a real person. So was Samuel Wilson of Troy, born in 1766. He was a meatpacker who provided food to U.S. troops stationed in upstate New York during the War of 1812. When his provisions arrived in barrels with the stamp of “U.S.” on them, soldiers joked that the letters stood for “Uncle Sam.” In 1961, Congress officially connected Wilson to the iconic image of Uncle Sam.
Bernard Vogel, chief administrator of Oakwood Cemetery, said that the need for a new flagpole near Wilson’s gravesite resulted from a fierce storm in the autumn of 2015. A huge tree fell, he said, and “missed all of the graves but bent the flagpole.”
After filing an insurance claim and getting quotes for a replacement, Vogel continued, “we went with Gettysburg Flag Works,” in part because it was a business based in the town where Uncle Sam delivered his goods.
Vogel credited the flag company with doing the installation “very quickly. Before I knew it, they were gone.” The work included removing the bottom of the former pole that was still in place and putting up the new one.
Mike Cronin, owner of Gettysburg Flag Works, stocks all sorts of flag-related merchandise, including poles. The largest flagstaff he has ever put in place, he said, rises 100 feet.
The aluminum pole he installed at Oakwood Cemetery now flies a 6×10-foot all-weather nylon American flag with a high-wind rating so that the next storm won’t topple the staff – or rip Old Glory.
“It looks beautiful,” Cronin said of the Oakwood installation, which was completed in time for the sesquicentennial of the real Uncle Sam’s birth.
(For further information, visit www.oakwoodcemetery.org and www.gettysburgflag.com.)
