It was 1814, and the United States and Great Britain had been at war for two years. The city of Bal­ti­more had been prepar­ing for an even­tual attack, but sit­ting in the way of the British was Major George Armis­tead, com­man­der of Fort McHenry [1. Named after James McHenry, a Scotch-Irish immi­grant and surgeon-soldier who became Sec­re­tary of War under Pres­i­dent George Wash­ing­ton, Fort McHenry was built to defend the port of Bal­ti­more from future enemy attacks after Amer­ica had won its inde­pen­dence. It was posi­tioned on the Locust Point penin­sula which juts into the open­ing of Bal­ti­more Har­bor, and was con­structed in the form of a five-pointed star sur­rounded by a dry moat.] and his bunkered forces in Chesa­peake Bay. Know­ing that an attack would come from the sea, Major Armis­tead com­mis­sioned Mary Young Pick­ers­gill, a local Bal­ti­more flag maker, to sew a flag for the fort “so large that the British will have no dif­fi­culty see­ing it from a distance.”

Pick­ers­gill had learned flag mak­ing from her mother, Rebecca Young, who made ensigns [2. An ensign is a dis­tin­guish­ing flag of a ship or a mil­i­tary unit, or a dis­tin­guish­ing token, emblem, or badge, such as a sym­bol of office.] and con­ti­nen­tal stan­dards dur­ing and after Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion. After mar­ry­ing and mov­ing to Philadel­phia, Mary returned to Bal­ti­more, wid­owed and with a small child. She estab­lished a flag-making busi­ness out of her home. Through her trade she sup­ported her fam­ily by design­ing, sewing, and sell­ing “silk stan­dards, cav­alry and divi­sion colours of every descrip­tion.” She cre­ated sig­nal and house flags for the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and mer­chant ships that vis­ited Baltimore’s harbor.

When asked by Major Armis­tead to sew the flag, she cre­ated in just 6 weeks an Amer­i­can flag mea­sur­ing 30x42 feet with the help of her daugh­ter, two nieces, and two ser­vants. Each stripe was two feet wide and each star was two feet from tip to tip. As a result the flag could be seen from sev­eral miles away from the fort.

When the British attacked Bal­ti­more, Fran­cis Scott Key, a lawyer aboard the British ship HMS Ton­nant, saw Pickersgill’s flag while he was held cap­tive and was inspired to com­pose the poem that became the national anthem of the United States. Pickersgill’s flag, being restored, is the cen­ter­piece of the redesigned National Museum of Amer­i­can His­tory at the Smith­son­ian Insti­tu­tion. [3. The mate­r­ial for this piece came from the Mary­land Women’s Hall of Fame and Wikipedia.]