May 26, 2020
Zany Ganung would have appreciated all of the American flags flown for Memorial Day yesterday. However, she did not appreciate the Confederate “palmetto and rattlesnake flag” she found flying across from her house at 160 E. California Street when she returned to Jacksonville on June 11, 1861, after nursing a sick patient all night…or so one story goes. Supposedly, she entered her California Street house, returned with a hatchet, crossed the street, chopped the pole down, and used the flag to stoke her stove. However, the story may have been confused with an 1855 incident, when town women protested their men folk 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 there at the time, having arrived in Jacksonville in 1854 with her husband Lewis, but no one knows if she was involved. The Ganung house was razed in 1965, having subsequently served as saloon and post office. The site is now home to Pico’s Worldwide.