Flags saluted on Flag Day
In 1861, the year the Civil War began and with the pivotal battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg still two years in the future, the citizens of Hartford, Connecticut, decorated their businesses and homes with flags in a colorful display of patriotism.
The occasion was Flag Day, celebrated on June 14 because, on that date in 1777, the Continental Congress had formalized the design of the American flag.
Hartford’s citizens thus established themselves as the progenitors of all subsequent Flag Day observances. In a resolution offered by a state senator in 1862 and reported in The Hartford Courant, the flag was declared to be “dear to us” as a “symbol of the Union which our fathers established and which we have so long loved.”
The banner was even more precious, the senator continued, given “the toils and sacrifices which we are…called upon to undergo…to preserve the union of the States.”
With that in mind, he urged the people of Connecticut to celebrate the city’s second Flag Day with special enthusiasm, and they exuberantly followed through. As the Courant recorded, “There was an unusually large amount of bunting displayed…from the various residences and stores of our city.”
The paper described how one store was “handsomely dressed in red, white and blue,” while another building “had streamers…from the top of the house to the street below.” A third company outdid those two by crowding its windows with flags of many sizes, outlining its doors with more and suspending still more from ropes that cascaded from the roof to the street.
What began in Connecticut spread 
across the U.S. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson urged all Americans to mark Flag Day. However, it did not become an official national observance until 1949, when Congress passed – and President Harry Truman signed – a bill creating National Flag Day.
In 2012, President Obama issued a Flag Day proclamation that said: “For over 200 years, our flag has proudly represented our Nation and our ideals at home and abroad. It has billowed above monuments and memorials, flown beside the halls of government, stood watch over our oldest institutions, and graced our homes and storefronts….It will forever remain an emblem of the ideals that inspired our great Nation: liberty, democracy, and the enduring freedom to make of our lives what we will.”