You indeed did not post this with claims that these poles were for flag staffs and I certainly did not mean to imply that. Indeed there is contradiction in what I said so please let me clarify - these poles were for pikes as weapons of war when manufactured. Later on, however, they may have been used for other purposes although I can now recall Union troops in Georgia finding Joe Brown pikes in warehouses on the Georgia campaign that were not used for anything other than what they were intended and they never saw use in that role either.

So what I meant by "may have been used" is just exactly that - they might have seen other uses including as flag staffs but we have no direct evidence for such changes that I have ever seen anyway. The CSA was very resourceful and wasted little as they simply could not afford to. I would love to find something that proved these were used for flag staffs!

Greg Biggs