The Confederate Flag of Welcome
Paducah, McCracken County, Kentucky
Marker Inscription
Confederate Flag of Welcome. With the Confederate occupation of Hickman and Columbus in the late summer of 1861, Paducahans were thrilled and flew a large Confederate flag to welcome Southern Army thought on way. As General Grant's Union forces, backed by gunboats, moved to occupy Paducah on Sept. 6, it was feared flag would be seized. See over. (Reverse) Rescue of Flag - Mrs. Emily Jarrett, whose husband and sons were fighting for the CSA, rushed to save the banner. Under Union gunboat fire, she had a small slave boy climb the pole, retrieve the flag, and drop it to her. Union troops searched her home but failed to find flag's hiding place. Some thirty years later, the faded cloth was laid to rest with its loyal rescuer. Over.
Erected by Kentucky Historical Society
The Story
When Confederate forces occupied nearby Hickman and Columbus in the summer of 1861, hopeful Paducahans raised a large Confederate flag to welcome a Southern army they believed was on its way. Instead, General Grant's Union troops, backed by gunboats, moved to occupy Paducah on September 6. As seizure loomed, Mrs. Emily Jarrett rushed to save the banner, having a boy climb the pole to drop it to her, and hid it from searching Union soldiers—keeping it until it was buried with her decades later.
Why it matters
The episode captures the wrenching loyalties of a Union-occupied Confederate-sympathizing town in the border state of Kentucky, where the war was fought in parlors as much as on battlefields.
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Related people
- · Mrs. Emily Jarrett
- · Gen. Ulysses S. Grant
Related events
- · Union occupation of Paducah, 1861
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Haywood County Confederate Statue
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This monument honors the soldiers of Haywood County, Tennessee, who fought and died for the Confederacy during the Civil War of 1861–1865, and it pointedly salutes the county's Confederate women, whose labor sustained the home front. Memorials like it rose across the South in the decades after the war — most during the Jim Crow era, erected by groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy — to shape how the Lost Cause was remembered.
Col. Ed Murray's Home
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Here stood the home of Colonel Ed Murray, who oversaw the building of the USS Merrimac in 1855. Seized by Confederates at Norfolk in 1861 and rebuilt as the ironclad CSS Virginia, the ship helped usher in a new age of naval warfare. In March 1862 it sank two Union vessels at Hampton Roads and then fought the USS Monitor to a draw in the first-ever battle between ironclad warships.
McCracken County Courthouse
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The first courthouse on this site was completed in 1861, just as the Civil War began, and was quickly occupied by the Union Army and pressed into service as a military hospital. Paducah's county government had moved here from Wilmington decades earlier, and the present courthouse was built with Works Progress Administration help between 1940 and 1943. The story of the site traces McCracken County's growth from a log courthouse to a New Deal–era public building.
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