While Ovington’s flag was likely created as a personal display of patriotism, the BHS collection is also home to more than a dozen Civil War–era regimental flags and ceremonial banners associated with New York battalions. Because the Long Island Historical Society was founded during the war, in 1863, the scars and relics of that conflict were among the first items donated for preservation. And while these regimental flags honor the men who served, it is through more intimate war mementoes that the struggles and sacrifices of those soldiers and their families survive.

A letter in the BHS collection written by Brooklynite Mary A. Herbert documents her devastation at the death of her only son, Joseph. A member of New York’s 173rd Regiment Company K, Joseph was killed in action on June 14, 1863, at Port Hudson, Louisiana. Mary Herbert waited months for confirmation of her son’s fate, finally receiving word of his death from Nathaniel Augustus Conklin, a fellow Brooklynite from the 173rd Regiment. 

Herbert’s grief echoes from the pages of her response to Conklin, embodying the anguish of family members of the deceased. “I feared…I was writing to the dead from not having heard from him in so long a time. Still I kept hoping against fear that it might be from some other cause but not my hopes are all blasted and I am left a lonely widow by the death of my only son.”

A letter in the BHS collection written by Brooklynite Mary A. Herbert documents her devastation at the death of her only son, Joseph. A member of New York’s 173rd Regiment Company K, Joseph was killed in action on June 14, 1863, at Port Hudson, Louisiana. Mary Herbert waited months for confirmation of her son’s fate, finally receiving word of his death from Nathaniel Augustus Conklin, a fellow Brooklynite from the 173rd Regiment. 

Herbert’s grief echoes from the pages of her response to Conklin, embodying the anguish of family members of the deceased. “I feared…I was writing to the dead from not having heard from him in so long a time. Still I kept hoping against fear that it might be from some other cause but not my hopes are all blasted and I am left a lonely widow by the death of my only son.”

Martha Ovington’s meticulously hand-stitched red, white, and blue wool flag offers a rare opportunity to consider the transition that occurred in women’s training and education in urban America in the 1800s. 

The carefully cut and pieced-together flag displays Ovington’s skill with a needle and mastery of sewing skills long taught to young girls to aid in their domestic work. By the early 1860s, women’s education had evolved into a more rigorous academic pursuit, on par with men’s education. When she sewed this flag, Ovington was among the first generation of affluent women to study at and graduate from Brooklyn’s Packer Collegiate Institute.

The Packer Collegiate Institute originally opened to students as the Brooklyn Female Academy on May 4, 1846. It was renamed in early 1853 after a fire ravaged the original building. Brooklynite Harriet L. Packer gave a gift of $65,000 for the rebuild, asking that the school be renamed after her late husband William, a former BFA trustee.

Ovington attended Packer in her late teens. For students fourteen and older, collegiate classes included not only religious education and language and arts training but also instruction in physics, botany, philosophy, and constitutional law. Ovington graduated in July 1861 alongside more than two dozen classmates from across the country, including one from the Sandwich Islands, known today as Hawaii.

According to Packer alumni records, several graduates from the Packer class of 1861 went on to successful teaching careers of their own. Ovington was a dedicated student, but her family later blamed her “overexertion” at school for the chronic health issues that later claimed her life.

During the Civil War, many women made flags and similar items to sell in hopes of raising money to aid Union troops. Beginning in 1863, American women began organizing “sanitary fairs,” fundraising spectacles intended to raise funds for the United States Sanitary Commission. This federal agency oversaw soldiers’ everyday “sanitary interests,” providing food, clothing, housing, transportation, and care for the sick and wounded. 

Although it is unclear whether she made this flag for the fair, Martha Ovington undoubtedly knew about the fair and perhaps even attended the Brooklyn and Long Island Sanitary Fair, held over two weeks in February 1864.

Largely organized by Long Island–area volunteers from the local Women’s Relief Association, the fair was held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and in two neighboring, built specifically for the fair. The event was both a fundraiser and a community morale booster, providing a diversion from the war. There was an art gallery, agricultural displays, and a popular exhibition designed to resemble a New England kitchen.

Through solicited donations, ticket sales, and goods sold, the fair raised over $403,000, more than any similar sanitary fair held to that point. 

The Brooklyn and Long Island Sanitary Fair lasted only two weeks, but many of the curiosities and historical documents displayed during the event were preserved by the Long Island Historical Society (now Brooklyn Historical Society). In February 1864, LIHS was barely a year old, and its founders recognized the fair as an unprecedented collecting opportunity. In a written plea to their members, they asked, “Will you not, among your purchases, remember our Society and procure for us a Picture, a Volume, a Collection of Autographs, a Set of Coins, a Piece of old Armor, Furniture, Costume—any thing, indeed, which is curious and ancient, and which will contribute to illustrate the Past.”

The request from LIHS proved successful with local donors. Today the BHS collection includes artifacts and documents of local and national importance brought into the institution from the fair.

Martha J. Ovington died on June 22, 1882, at age 41 and was buried at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Cemetery records note epilepsy as “Mattie’s” cause of death. New research into public and private records reveals the tragic story of Ovington’s long struggle with physical and mental health, struggles that America’s then fledgling public health system was ill-equipped to manage. 

Unlike many other affluent young women in the 1800s, Ovington left behind no known personal documents recording the details of her daily life. However, public records like the 1880 federal census reveal unexpected information about her life. Ovington’s name is listed that year in the census’s new supplemental section for documenting the “defective, dependent, and delinquent classes.” Under “form of disease,” her illness is described simply as “melancholia,” or depression, from which she had apparently suffered for eighteen years.

While modern audiences might assume that sensitive personal details like these would have remained largely private, the Ovington’s prominent family brought Martha’s struggles into the national spotlight. In July 1874, New York–area newspapers began running stories about a local divorce scandal. Brooklynite, Henry A. Ovington, Martha’s father, had been granted a divorce on his daughter’s behalf. 

The articles note that Martha’s “mental faculties” had supposedly declined following her overexertion as a student at Packer Collegiate Institute. Following Martha’s graduation, her parents sent her to Huntington, Long Island, for medical treatment, where Martha met a Mr. George Speier. The family agreed to let the couple marry, believing that domestic stability might “allay [Martha’s] disorder.” 

By 1874, however, Martha’s condition had deteriorated. Her parents ended the marriage and took in the couple’s two young children, one of whom, Florence, would later donate her mother’s Civil War flag to LIHS (now BHS).

Records indicate that Martha was likely never formally institutionalized but rather had access to private care overseen by a physician or caregiver, which her family resources made possible. For those who could not afford private care, specialized care in mental hospitals—commonly known as asylums, then—became available in the United States beginning in the early 1800s, with numerous state-funded institutions built throughout the century.

Another woman from Martha’s family, her niece Mary White Ovington (1865–1951), was the best known of the Brooklyn Ovingtons. 

The Ovington family roots in Brooklyn date to the early 1800s, when the region’s rising commercial interests attracted many new settlers. Henry A. Ovington, Martha’s father, settled his young family in the growing suburb of Brooklyn, purchasing a home in the Fourth Ward and a farm in New Utrecht (now the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bay Ridge). Martha was the second youngest of ten. As a child, she witnessed her older brothers become successful merchants and founders of Ovington Brothers, a popular china and home goods retailer with stores in downtown Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Mary White Ovington was born in 1865, daughter of Martha’s older brother Theodore and his wife, Mary. As a child, Mary likely heard Henry Ward Beecher’s progressive sermons from the family pew at Plymouth Church and learned about abolition and women’s suffrage from her parents. Like her aunt Martha, Mary graduated from Packer Collegiate Institute and began advanced studies at Radcliffe College until financial difficulties forced her to withdraw.

Following a moving speech by Booker T. Washington in 1903, Mary White Ovington devoted herself to social reform causes, particularly issues of race in America and the struggles of African Americans in New York. Her observations and research resulted in the publication of Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York (1911), a well-known record of African American life in the Empire State. 

Mary White Ovington is best known today as one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), formed in 1909 with early civil rights activists, including Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois. Ovington served as the organization’s first executive secretary.