Ever notice an unusual flag in front of a prim yellow house on Betty Street in Clarkesville, near the Soque River Greenway? Or a different flag in front of the same house, the next day? Or a third on the next?
As it turns out, there are some 80 flags within the 100-year-old home, which belongs to The Rev. Dr. Dwight Ogier, a mostly retired Episcopal priest, and his wife, Barbara (Babs) Ogier. The Rev. Ogier, age 83, is a chaplain to retired Episcopal clergy, and also spends a fair amount of time these days finding new homes for old theology and Bible texts, driving them and delivering them to various Protestant churches around the area; he showed off a car-trunk full of them.
But at home, you might as well call Ogier the Flag Man. On his expansive front lawn, he displays a colorful collection of flags, one at a time, from historical moments, colleges across the South, and countries across the world. He rotates through them, often displaying six or seven a week, sometimes in keeping with a historical moment, sometimes just for fun. Ogier hangs the flags from a modest flagpole at the front of his yard, facing Betty Street, and he says they don’t attract much attention. Well, a little.
On Easter Monday, a brightly colored flag featuring a cute baby chick was out front, but it would be gone by Tuesday. Ogier proudly showed off the others in the three tightly bundled racks in his den:
- Two different takes on the University of Georgia flag, one of them featuring a bulldog;
- The city flag of Jacksonville, Florida, where he grew up;
- The flag of the Isle of Guernsey, homeland of Ogier’s ancestors;
- Several iterations of the Confederate flag;
- The state flag of Oklahoma, which—strictly by coincidence—Ogier hung out on April 19th this year. He then discovered it was the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing;
- One from the “Conch Republic,” a nickname for Key West, Florida, and an inside joke about its independent spirit;
- One from the Republic of West Florida, a briefly independent territory that included parts of Alabama as well as the Pensacola area;
- One from the U.S. Army Airborne Division;
- Two from Normandy, France, are tied to the World War II battle there;
- Christopher Columbus’ flag, featuring crowns representing Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand;
- And, among other Georgia flags, the “Barnes Flag,” instituted by Gov. Roy Barnes in 2001, which Ogier proudly calls his “ugliest flag.”
The Rev. Ogier was born in Ft. Benning, Georgia, where his father served as a military attorney, and where the elder Ogier helped create the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. The younger Ogier received his education at Sewanee University of the South in Tennessee and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary; he was three years into ministry and applied to serve as a Navy chaplain, but the Vietnam War was winding down, so it seemed his services were no longer needed.
Ogier says he has no targeted political intent in flying any of the flags, and hopes no one is taken aback by, for example, his Cuban flag, which he keeps and displays “only because I want to visit there,” as his father did before the Communist revolution. He does expressly object to modern activists trying to ban Confederate flags and other symbols, and he decries the temporary name change of Fort Benning under former President Biden; the Fort’s name originally honored a Confederate general. “You shouldn’t erase history,” he said, with a frown.
He has seen some exotic locales during his ministry, including two tours to churches in St. Croix. He also visited Jerusalem on a church trip, and notes that, while the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs are Muslim, “there are a surprising number of Arab Anglicans,” the English counterpart to his own Episcopal Church. Ogier served various pulpits around the South, including at Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church in Clarkesville, and settled locally some years back, where his daughter, Grace Ogier Warren, a University of Georgia Ph.D. and educator, had also settled. The Ogiers’ granddaughter, Phoebe, is graduating from Habersham Central High School this spring and will head off to Athens in the fall, like her mother.
The Ogiers’ son, Timothy, lives in Florida, and Ogier boasts, “can fix anything.”
In the fall of 2023, the Ogiers’ house caught some passing pedestrians’ and motorists’ eyes when he hung a Palestinian flag one day, then an Israeli one the day after, not long after Palestinian Hamas terrorists based in Gaza attacked and killed 1,200 Israelis on October 7th that year, taking 250 others as hostages. Again, he did not mean to take a political position, he says. There is always another flag and another cause, and when it came to the seemingly opposing messages of the two flags, he said, “I just wanted to show some balance.”
With 80 flags to show, just about everyone gets a moment of representation.
