Waynesboro — Paul Dye never doubted that the stain on the old battle flag was the blood of his ancestor.

When a cousin gave the relic to him and his brother, pulling it out of a dress box she kept under a bed, she told them the story of their kinsman, William D. Whitehead, who was shot down as he carried the banner into combat in Virginia.

CURTIS COMPTON/AJC (ENLARGE)

Paul Dye, 75, the flag's owner, looks over the remains of a store built around 1880 on his family's Ivanhoe Plantation. The plantation, just outside of Waynesboro, dates to 1765.

Vourtesy of Richard D. Hatch and Associates (ENLARGE)

Paul Dye's Civil War flag may seem to be reversed. It is not. Unlike the Stars and Stripes, the stars on this flag were placed on the right.

ABOUT CIVIL WAR BATTLE FLAGS • Southern armies first marched to war under the Stars and Bars. But that design looked confusingly like the Stars and Stripes, so it was replaced with the famous criss-cross battle flag. • Early regimental flags were usually sewn by women on the home front. Many had slogans reminding soldiers what they were fighting for, such as one in Virginia that read, "Home." • Battle flags weren't just ceremonial. Troops used them to form lines. • Flag-bearers had some of the highest casualty rates of the war because the other side shot at the colors. The banners, usually made of silk, had to be replaced often. Online: Find more on the 2nd Georgia flag up for auction at www.richardhatchauctions.com. • More photos • More Living news • More Metro news

Decades later, Dye related that tale to Richard D. Hatch, an auctioneer who plans to sell the heirloom -- one of the rarest Civil War flags in Georgia -- Friday night in Flat Rock, N.C.

There's only one problem: Experts have raised questions about the lore behind the colors.

"It's a great artifact, but there's no way it could have gone into all the battles they claim it went into," says Greg Biggs, a military historian in Tennessee who has researched Confederate flags for 18 years.

Another historian, Keith Bohannon of West Georgia University, told the auction house that he suspected the regiment had replaced the flag months before Whitehead fell at the Battle of Malvern Hill on July 1, 1862.

Word of the scholarly skepticism riles Dye. "If anyone has questions, I'll do a DNA test," he vows. "But I know that's my family's blood on that flag."

There's more than honor at stake. Civil War collectibles can command thousands of dollars these days. In late 2006, a flag that had belonged to famed Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart fetched a record $956,000 at auction in Nashville.

No one is suggesting Dye's flag is worth that much. But if the stories that have been handed down are true, it could sell for more than the $200,000 reserve, the minimum amount he's willing to accept.

And if they aren't true?

"I might not sell it," he says. "Hell, I can always sell some land instead."

Marching to war

Dye, a 75-year-old antiques dealer, still lives on the plantation his family started in 1765 with a grant from the king of England. He farmed the property for 35 years but leases most of it now for timber and cotton. The 1,500-acre spread south of Augusta has been known since before the Civil War as Ivanhoe.

When the war broke out in the spring of 1861, Whitehead, the plantation owner's son, was 20 and a recent graduate of the University of Georgia. He joined the Burke Sharpshooters, a company of local volunteers, and was assigned to carry the colors for its regiment, the 2nd Georgia Infantry.

Eight women from Burke County stitched the regimental flag from cotton cloth. It measured 3-feet-by-4-feet and had three broad bands of red and white and 11 stars on a field of blue, a design known as the Confederacy's first national flag, or the Stars and Bars.

Less than a year later, Whitehead was bearing the flag -- or another like it -- when he was killed in Virginia. "He still clung to its shattered staff and embraced in its pierced and tattered folds," the Augusta Daily Constitutionalist wrote in its obituary.

The 2nd Georgia went on to fight at Antietam, where it earned praise for holding off a superior Union force, and at Fredericksburg, Gettysburg and Petersburg. The regiment surrendered with Gen. Robert E. Lee at Appomattox.

Shot to pieces?

The flag up for auction is the only known surviving banner of the 2nd Georgia, the historians agree. The question is whether the Sharpshooters carried it into all those battles, as the auction house claims in its press release.

That isn't likely, says Mikell Harper of Rabun Gap, Ga., who wrote a book about the unit, "The Second Georgia Infantry Regiment," with Dye's cooperation. He thinks the flag was replaced in late 1862, when the Confederates were switching to the more familiar St. Andrew's Cross, the controversial emblem that used to be on the Georgia state flag.

Historian Biggs puts the date a year earlier -- long before Whitehead was killed -- and cites quartermaster records as proof.

Whenever it was retired from battle, the flag the ladies sewed may have stayed with the regiment and been stored in the rear with its baggage. Harper believes that standard was returned home in 1863, when the regiment was detached from Lee's army and traveled by rail to Georgia, where it fought at Chickamauga. The troops stopped in Augusta on the way and gave a flag to Burke Countians to display in their courthouse.

In a diary entry on Nov. 9, 1864, Whitehead's sister, Catherine Whitehead Rowland, described seeing it: "It made my heart ache when I looked at what remained of it for it is shot almost to pieces & I thought of my darling, noble Brother, who was the first to fall in bearing that flag."

Biggs wonders whether she was even describing the auction item; that flag has some holes but hardly looks "shot almost to pieces."

Whitehead's family was allowed to take the flag home from the courthouse. Two weeks later, a wing of Gen. William T. Sherman's army descended on Ivanhoe during its March to the Sea and began to loot the plantation. Confederate cavalry galloped up and chased them away, a skirmish soon to be commemorated by a roadside history marker.

The flag stayed with the family.

Out of the box

Dye was about 20 when he first saw the banner more than half a century ago. He and his late brother, Rowland, folded it up in an accordion file and placed it in a safety deposit box in a Waynesboro bank.

It slumbered there for decades, rarely disturbed, until Mikell Harper visited Burke County a few years ago to research a forebear who had fought with the 2nd Georgia. The Dyes took him to the vault, spread out the fading cloth and let him snap some pictures.

"He wanted us to take it to the Confederate cemetery so he could do a picture of it hanging on the monument," Dye says, "but I said, 'No way.' "

When Harper's book came out in 2005, with an image of the flag on the cover, Dye removed the artifact from the bank and took it to a signing in Augusta. A deputy sheriff and a uniformed Confederate re-enactor stood guard on either side.

The flag wasn't paroled again until last month, when Dye drove it to North Carolina for the auction. He doesn't really need the money, he says; it's just time the relic finds a new home and gets some needed (and expensive) conservation.

Dye won't be at the auction Friday night; he has an antiques show in Madison. But he'll keep in touch with the bidding through his wife, Louise, who plans to attend.

If the price isn't right, the flag will go back in the lock box.

"I'm not 200 percent sure I want to sell it anyway," Dye says. "To tell you the truth, this whole thing has made my stomach hurt."