Courtesy of Flag House and Star-Spangled Banner Museum. Pickersgill was paid $405.90 for the flag that became the Star-Spangled Banner, more than most Baltimoreans earned in a year. Needles, scissors, pins, and chatelaine from the, early 1800s, of the type Pickersgill and her assistants would have used to make the flag. There they assembled the pieces of the flag and placed fifteen cotton stars on the blue canton. She moved the operation across the street to the more spacious Claggett’s brewery. The huge 30 by 42–foot flag overwhelmed the cramped rooms of Pickersgill’s house. Mary Pickersgill, nearly forty years after she made the flag.Ĭourtesy of Pickersgill Retirement Community. They assembled the blue canton and the red and white stripes of the flag by piecing together strips of loosely woven English wool bunting that were only 12 or 18 inches wide. Pickersgill and her assistants spent about seven weeks making the two flags. Pickersgill’s elderly mother, Rebecca Young, from whom she had learned flag making, may have helped as well. Helping Pickersgill make the flags were her thirteen-year-old daughter Caroline nieces Eliza Young (thirteen) and Margaret Young (fifteen) and a thirteen-year-old African American indentured servant, Grace Wisher. She filled orders for many of the military and merchant ships that sailed into Baltimore’s busy port. Pickersgill, a thirty-seven-year-old widow, was an experienced maker of ships’ colors and signal flags. The one that became the Star-Spangled Banner was a 30 x 42–foot garrison flag the other was a 17 x 25–foot storm flag for use in inclement weather. In the summer of 1813, Mary Pickersgill (1776–1857) was contracted to sew two flags for Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland. ![]() Making the Flag Explore The Interactive Flag
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