High and mighty
Every day of the year at the George Street end of the College Green, the Stars and Stripes waves proudly atop a large white wooden pole.
Brown’s flag display is more than a patriotic symbol, however. The flagstaff itself is apparently an antique relic of the legendary ocean-racing champion Columbia.
Only three times in history has a boat won the America’s Cup twice in succession. Intrepid triumphed in 1967 and 1970, and then Courageous repeated the trick in 1974 and 1977. The first boat to win the race twice, though, was the Columbia, which outstripped Sir Thomas Lipton’s Shamrock 1 in 1899 and Shamrock 2 in 1901.
In the 1899 America’s Cup, Columbia was the defender, and her afterguard — the key crew who devised her racing strategy from the stern — included C. Oliver Iselin and his wife, Hope Goddard Iselin, a veteran Rhode Island sailor who was timekeeper. She was the first woman to play such a critical role in an America’s Cup race.
After a failed third run at the cup in 1903, Columbia was put in dry dock, and there was talk of converting her hull into a restaurant. Finally, though, she was dismantled and sold.
In 1918 Oliver Iselin donated what is thought to be one of her steel-and-Oregon-pine masts to the naval unit at Brown, which installed it on the College Green as a flagstaff. The 1938 hurricane uprooted several elms, taking the mast down with them, but it was remounted and still stands. A small brass plaque identifies it only as coming from “an American racing yacht,” but in the University Archives is a letter Hope Iselin wrote to former President Barnaby Keeney vouching for the “strong possibility” that it came from Columbia.
(Adapted from an article by Charlotte Bruce Harvey in the May/June 2008 Brown Alumni Magazine.)