The Flag Shop has 13 franchises across Canada. Our New Brunswick store has this story to share about one of their biggest jobs.
Acadian flags are a pretty standard order in the New Brunswick Flag Shop – the second best seller behind Canadian flags, in fact, but orders for a 30 foot by 60 foot flag are anything but standard. When Saint-Louis-de-Kent decided to mark the 125th anniversary of the designing and adoption of the Acadian flag by ordering an impressively large Acadian flag, The Flag Shop and its manager Belinda Gagne had quite the challenge.
The challenge was two-fold – one, they had to make an unprecedentedly large flag, and two, they had to install an unprecedentedly large flag pole. The large Acadian flag – which has the same design as the French flag but with a gold star on the hoist side – was sewn together from many different panels and weighs over 60 pounds by itself. The flagpole needed to extend 130 feet in the air and have a great deal of concrete poured to support the weight of the seven ton shaft. It took several weeks to get the pole installed in time for the inaugural flag raising on November 8, 2009 which was greeted with much ceremony including a two weeks of festivities in the run up to the flag raising.
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The large flag is put away every winter to protect it from the harsh weather and brought out again in the spring. It requires about fifteen people to keep the flag off of the ground while it is being raised. The Flag Shop New Brunswick has since made a second flag to reduce the amount of wear – a common concern with larger flags.
See some of the other work our New Brunswick store has done.