NORWAY – A remnant of a Maine infantry regiment’s Civil War battle flag that a soldier safeguarded at Gettysburg will be turned over Thursday to the Maine State Museum.

Pvt. Isaac Monk of Turner, whose unit faced imminent capture after being surrounded by Confederates on July 1, 1863, had grabbed the silken fragment as the 16th Maine tore up its cherished flags to keep them from falling into enemy hands.

Now, 142 years later, Monk’s great-grandson, Neil Brown of Norway, is donating the flag fragment to the museum’s collection.

Brown, who brought the fragment to his home after the recent death of his widowed mother, said the museum has the expertise to care for it and the resources to display it so it can be shared with the people of Maine.

The remnant hung on his family’s living-room wall during his boyhood, Brown recalled. He decided even while his mother was alive that it should eventually go to the state museum, a suggestion first made by his son, Adam Brown, a Civil War buff.

“It means more to have people see it” than to keep it in the family or sell it to a private collector, Adam Brown said. “Let the professionals have it. And let the people share it.”

Selling the remnant “wasn’t even an option,” the younger Brown said, because asking money for something of such value “would cheapen it.”

Remnants of regimental flags, like the surviving flags handed down by other Civil War regiments, are “almost like tangible sacred reminders of that time in our history,” said Earle Shettleworth, Jr., of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission.

Monk was captured at Gettysburg the day he grabbed the fragment. He was paroled, although it is not clear if he was released right away or held prisoner for a time.

The fragment, protected under a glass cover in a dark wooden frame, is accompanied by a four-line note, written in an elegant script with occasional misspellings. The note describes the fragment as: “A Peace of the old Sixteenth Maine Regiment flag torn up at Gettesburg after they was taken Prisoners July first Eighteen hundred Sixty three.” It is signed “I.J. Monk.”

The image of the soldiers of the 16th Maine deliberately destroying their beloved banners in the name of honor “is still transcendent” more than 140 years later, Shettleworth said. “That’s probably as dramatic as it becomes,” he said, and it “underscores the concept that existed in the military lore of the 19th century that you do not allow the flag to fall,” either to the ground or to the enemy.

The museum, which has two 16th Maine flag fragments in its collection, is “thrilled” to be getting a third, said Laurie LaBar, its curator of historic collections. Such fragments, according to historians, are highly valued because of the high drama surrounding them and the fact that no one knows how many of them still exist.