Flag Making in Baltimore

There once was a flagmaker named Mary Pickersgill who lived in Baltimore with her daughter Caroline.  Caroline was born in 1800 into a family of important flagmakers, her grandmother having sewn flags for General George Washington's Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.

In 1812, the United States was at war with Britain.  One day the flag shop was visited by Major George Armistead and two other military officers from Fort McHenry, a star-shaped fort that protects the mouth of the Inner Harbor of Baltimore.

They requested that Mary make the largest flag possible...so that there would be no way the British could miss seeing it should they sail into Baltimore harbor.



Over the following weeks, Mary, Caroline, a couple of nieces, and an African-American indentured servant sewed approximately 350,000 stitches over four hundred yards of wool bunting to make the 30'x42' flag that came go be known as the Star Spangled Banner.



Since there were no flag standards at the time, the flag had 15 stars and 15 stripes.

The stars were two feet wide from point to point...



And the stripes were each two feet wide, making this young lady just over 4 feet tall...



The flag became too large to contain in the flag shop so the women moved it to the floor of an alehouse where they could lay it out to complete work on it.  It took them six weeks to complete the flag and Mary was paid $405.90.

Two years later, Baltimore watched as Washington D.C. fell and was burned by the British.  They prepared themselves to fight.  As expected, the British sailed into Baltimore harbor on September 13 and 14, 1814.

And it was Mary's flag that flew that night over Fort McHenry, the same flag that Francis Scott Key saw in the dawn's early light and the same flag which inspired him to write the Star-Spangled Banner which became our National Anthem.

The Maryland Historical Society is following Mary's path and re-stitching that same flag in the same six weeks in honor of the Battle's 200th year anniversary.



They have enlisted many quilting guilds in the area to do the bulk of the work but they are holding public stitching days so that anyone who is interested can go and take a stitch...

I found a couple of hours to zip down there on Saturday...

And put my stitch into this ginormous flag!

The next and last public stitch day is on Sunday, August 11, 2013 from Noon to 3.  

If you're in the Baltimore area, I highly recommend you stop by.  You can pre-register here...but if you forget, I think they would still welcome you.

They have re-enactors in period costume...

Who share all the history of this important flag...

People of all ages and sizes came to stitch on the flag that will fly over Fort McHenry this Defender's Day on Saturday, September 14.  

Though I was by myself, I had fun capturing the joy of this family that was next to me...

I don't know what it was about putting a stitch in the flag...

But everyone who did so seemed to love it!

You can see the original Star Spangled Banner at the Smithsonian's American History Museum in Washington, D.C.

And you might be interested in a prior post I wrote about Defender's Day in Baltimore here.