How United We Stand and the Avenue of Flags began in Whitfield County

Published 8:46 pm Sunday, September 5, 2010

Jim Chamblee remembers Jan. 18, 1991, vividly. The first Gulf War had begun the night before as the world watched the initial air strikes on Iraq on television. He answered his ringing telephone to hear Shirley Childs say, “Jim, before somebody starts a protest group, let’s start something that shows patriotism in this town.”

With Childs’ son in the U.S. Air Force and Chamblee’s son also in the Air Force and stationed in Saudi Arabia, this was personal. Chamblee immediately thought of Marsha Whitener whose husband Sparky was in the U.S. Army in Kuwait and called her.

“We discussed what we could do to get some flags flown and decided to try to get 150 flags to border the Whitfield County Courthouse sidewalk as a display of patriotism,” Chamblee says.  

The United We Stand committee was born. Every-other-week meetings at Chamblee’s office grew as people learned about the project and volunteered to help. What was once two people with an idea multiplied to become 41 committee members.

With a goal and a deadline in place, the group set about recruiting donors to purchase flags in the honor and in memory of United States armed forces veterans. Right away, the American Legion, the Elks Club and Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) offered to purchase the 128 flags needed to remember local veterans killed in action.  

“We wanted to make sure that all of those killed in action from Whitfield County had flags honoring them,” Chamblee says.

Instead of 150 flag orders, 558 poured in and the group had to halt the orders before their deadline in order to work out the needed logistical changes to get all the flags up by Memorial Day and launch the Avenue of Flags.

Local architect Lowell Kirkman developed a design for displaying the flags on the lawn. Ingenuity, persistence and donors led to the planting of 558 PVC pipe pieces in the ground into which the flags would be inserted, and the creation of 558 steel caps to cover the pipes when flags are not displayed. Everything having to do with the creation and implementation of the United We Stand holiday flag displays was provided by private resources.  

Beyond providing the courthouse lawn, no government group provides any other resources, according to Chamblee, with one exception. Every flag event, the Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office sends 11 prisoner trusties to help cart the boxes of flags from their storage room inside the courthouse parking deck to the lawn areas.

“We’ve been criticized for using these prisoners, but they need to be involved in patriotism, too, and in doing something for the community,” Chamblee contends.

The ongoing project really requires only three things now: One is the area in which to display the flags, another is assuring that volunteers are always available to post and retrieve the flags. Of course, maintenance of the flag, poles and holes is always involved, Chamblee points out.

“We never know what’s going to happen or who’s going to be there to help. We always want to invite the public to help and to feel the patriotism that we all feel from giving these few minutes on holidays to remember those who made and continue to make our freedom possible,” Chamblee says.