Zany Ganung

Did a Confederate flag once fly over Jacksonville?  And did Zany Ganung have the audacity to chop it down?

Lewis and Zany Ganung had traveled west from Ohio, arriving in Jacksonville in 1854.  Lewis Ganung was a doctor, and Zany frequently acted as his nurse.  On June 11, 1861, so the story goes, Zany returned home tired and exhausted after spending the past 24 hours with a very sick patient.  Overnight, someone had erected a flagpole flying the Confederate “palmetto and rattleshake flag” across the street from her house at 160 E. California Street.  No one knew who had raised it, and no one ventured to remove it for fear of starting a local civil war.  Without a word to anyone, Zany entered her house, returned with a hatchet, crossed the street, and chopped the pole down.  She then untied the flag, returned home, and used the flag to stoke the stove.  The Confederate flag never again flew over Jacksonville.

However, the story may have been confused with an 1855 incident, when town women protested their menfolk leaving them unprotected during the Indian Wars.  Local “wags” ridiculed them by hoisting a petticoat at half-mast on the post office flagpole.  The women were greatly incensed but had no means of getting the petticoat down.  A neighbor came to the rescue, hauling it down and allowing the women to march off with it in triumph.  Zany was in Jacksonville at the time, but no one knows if she was involved. 

The Ganung house was razed in 1965, and the site is now home to Pico’s Worldwide.