Don Troiani is a painter of carefully researched American military scenes who also collects historical artifacts. “If you’re a collector,” he told me recently, “you have to be fully prepared for your end, because all of a sudden people you’ve never heard of will be at the door.” We were talking about Bill Erquitt, who died a few years ago. Erquitt collected many things, but what brought him some acclaim and a fair degree of notoriety were Civil War relics, which filled his home in southwest Atlanta. “He was divorced, so there was stuff everywhere,” Troiani said. “Confederate belt buckles, swords, guns, and photography of Confederate soldiers. Like, five Confederate battle flags.”
Battle flags are particularly sought after by collectors. They “literally marked the battle lines, where soldiers from the North and South died by the tens of thousands,” Robert K. Wittman, who founded the F.B.I.’s art-crime team, writes in “Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World’s Stolen Treasures.” A particularly valuable flag was stolen in the nineteen-eighties from the Atlanta Historical Society—now the Atlanta History Center—where Erquitt worked as a curator. It had been handsewn in New Orleans in 1862; it was seized by a Union soldier during the occupation of Atlanta and carried on the Northern Army’s march to the sea. It ended up in a New Hampshire antique store, where it was bought, in 1938, by a couple from Georgia. “A Confederate Flag, Stolen in Atlanta During War Between the States, Comes Home,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. The couple donated it to the historical society. Decades later, Erquitt noted its disappearance in a letter to a historian. But the society, wishing to avoid embarrassment, never reported it missing.
Erquitt resigned from the job in 1992. Several months later, he starred in a three-part investigative series on local television, “The Lost Treasures of Atlanta,” which was billed as “one…
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