The 1,500 or so southerners captured with that flag paid a dear price for it the night after their capture as they huddled in the open in freezing rain and then faced that long trip to St. Louis to a prison that many did not survive. Many southern Missourians of the central five or six counties have on their war record "captured 19 December 1861 at Milford." That notation appears hundreds of times in the National Archives and Records Administration's microfilm records of southern POWs of Missouri.

Bruce Nichols