"More towns designing flags to join State House display" by Noah Bierman | Globe Staff, January 02, 2013
Peru is part of a trend, as once flagless towns in the Commonwealth adopt flags, after a bit of coaxing from constituents and state lawmakers, who say a flag is a way to instill community pride and to remind the rest of the world that their municipalities matter.
Towns, of course, don’t need flags. Unlike countries that wage battles or race to the moon, or states that christen dams and tunnels, many communities have been content with humbler markers of their domain, such as seals and stationery....
Senator Benjamin B. Downing, a Pittsfield Democrat, has made flags a personal mission....
About 20 towns in his Western Massachusetts district lacked flags, a rather high ratio in a district of 48 communities....
Several formed committees or held contests. Pittsfield designed its flag just in time for its 250th anniversary in 2011, after holding a contest. Otis held a contest in 2009, in time for its bicentennial. Worthington, Mount Washington, Tyringham, and Monterey followed suit. Northfield seemed close, but an artist’s proposal inspired by schoolchildren’s renderings was rejected at Town Meeting in 2011, over what some believe were budget concerns.
Yeah, those are my concerns in this time of austerity.
Is 351 flags, one from each Bay State community, within reach?
“I’d like to get them all in there, but I’m under no illusion that I will,” Downing said, lamenting how flags may not be at the top of everyone’s agenda.
The state began asking for flags two decades ago. The initial impulse was more logistical than civic. Former governor Michael S. Dukakis had covered a large atrium in the center of the State House, known as the Great Hall, to use for events. But the acoustics were terrible, and after a number of experiments, the state Bureau of Office Buildings determined in the early 1990s that municipal flags would solve the problem, while further connecting constituents to their capitol.
New England, it turns out, already had an unusually rich tradition of municipal flags, often with displays of pastoral imagery, said Hugh L. Brady, president of the North American Vexillogical Association, an organization dedicated to the study of flags....
Most flags now on display in the Great Hall are handmade, lovingly sewn together by seamstresses, according to Susan Greendyke Lachevre, art collections manager for the Bureau of State Office Buildings.
Still, not everyone is so enamored....
Like me.
Clarification: An earlier version of this story may have left the impression that....
The agenda-pushing doesn't win me over.
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The agenda-pushing doesn't win me over.
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