Betsy Ross flag

Did Betsy Ross make the first flag?

No document shows that she did. “Our Flag” says there is no proof that she made the first Stars and Stripes, though she made flags for the Pennsylvania State Navy in 1777, and it gives Francis Hopkinson of New Jersey, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, as the man strong evidence shows was responsible for the stars. Scholars doubted Canby from the start, Ulrich writes. George Henry Preble printed his account in an 1872 history of the flag but could not accept its chronology, which had the stars and stripes in use nearly a year before Congress adopted them. John Fow called the legend “ridiculous” in 1908, and David Eggenberg found in the 1950s that its provable facts came to two: that Betsy was a twice-widowed patriot needlewoman of Philadelphia, and that she was paid to make Pennsylvania naval flags in 1777.

Ulrich’s own answer is that there was no first flag to make. The 1777 resolution set no shape, no arrangement of stars and no size for the canton, and she points to a Smithsonian study showing that four-, six- and eight-pointed stars were far more common than five.

What the Betsy Ross House says

Historic Philadelphia, which runs the Betsy Ross House, grants that no written record proves the story and argues that the legend could be true. George Ross, a member of the flag committee, was the uncle of her late husband John; historians at Mount Vernon found that Betsy and John Ross made bed hangings for George Washington in 1774; and on 29 May 1777 the Pennsylvania State Navy Board paid her a large sum for making flags. Its suggestion is that she told the story to her family because Washington had come to her house, more than because of the flag.

How the legend spread

Ulrich traces the story’s fame to the decades after the Civil War. Charles Weisgerber’s painting “The Birth of Our Nation’s Flag” (1892) shows Ross with the flag in her lap and three men across the room, and millions saw it at the Chicago World’s Fair. In 1897 New York City’s public schools ordered thousands of copies. Weisgerber, a charter member of the American Flag House and Betsy Ross Memorial Association, raised money to save the house on Arch Street long thought to have been hers, and the association claimed over two million contributors, many of them children. The Betsy Ross Association deeded the house to the city of Philadelphia in 1941.

Often confused with

The Bennington flag also curves its stars in the canton, but in an arch over the number 76, and its outer stripes are white; the Bennington Museum dates it to the 19th century. The Serapis flag has blue stripes as well as red and white, and eight-pointed stars in rows.