Vermilion Schools to receive donation of 48-star US flag

Friends of Harbour Town will donate a very special flag to Vermilion Schools during a Board of Education meeting Oct. 9.

The 48-star United States flag has a special history with the district having flown over Vermilion High on Dec. 7, 1941.

“This flag could be seen flying over Vermilion High School, which was on South Street at the time, shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor,” said Kenneth Baughman, president for The Friends of Harbour Town Inc., the organization responsible for donating the flag. “After the attack on Pearl Harbor, a teacher named Willis Gebhardt, who later became the principal from 1945 to 1961, took down the flag on Dec. 8 and put up a brand new one to show respect for the lives lost.”

The old flag was kept by Gebhardt, who donated it to the Friends in the early 1990s.

Since then, the flag has remained in the care of the group.

With the recent announcement of the group’s closure, it is time the flag moves on.

“With our organization closing down, we felt it would be fitting to return the flag back to Vermilion High School,” Baughman said. “It is a part of their history, and so we will be donating it, alongside a monetary donation.”

The monetary donation is expected to help off-set the Greenfield Village field trips taken every year by the fifth-grade students.

A formal donation ceremony is expected during the board meeting at 6 p.m. at Vermilion High, 1250 Sanford St.

The American flag has other ties in Ohio.

In 1958, as part of a school project in 1958, Robert Heft, who later became mayor of Napoleon, Ohio, designed a 50-star American flag showcasing the hopeful inclusion of Alaska and Hawaii as states joining the Union.

At the time, only Alaska had officially joined.

According to an interview Heft, who was in Saginaw, Mich., did with Ohio Magazine in 2015, “I took an old flag stored in a closet at my grandparents’ home and cut out its star covered blue field, from there I bought $2 worth of blue cotton fabric and traced 100 stars on a white iron-on tape and arranged 50 to each side of the blue fabric.”

This alternating pattern of five rows of six stars and four rows of five stars would go on to become the nation’s 50-star flag.