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The American Ensign Was Just A Flag

The flag that Francis Scott Key saw flying over Fort McHenry was loved almost to death. Now, after a decade's conservation, the Star-Spangled Banner returns to its place of honor on the National Mall. Long before it flew to the moon, waved over the White House or was folded into tight triangles at Arlington National Cemetery; before it sparked fiery Congressional debates, reached the North Pole or the summit of Mount Everest; before it became a lapel fixture, testified to the Marines' possession of Iwo Jima, or fluttered over front porches, firetrucks and construction cranes; before it inspired a national anthem or recruiting posters for two world wars, the American ensign was just a flag.

Historian at Baltimore's Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine, Scott S. Sheads says. "There was nothing special about it," speaking of a time when a new nation was struggling for survival and groping toward a collective identity. That all changed in 1813, when one enormous flag, pieced together on the floor of a Baltimore brewery, was first hoisted over the federal garrison at Fort McHenry. In time the banner would take on larger meaning, set on a path to glory by a young lawyer named Francis Scott Key, passing into one family's private possession and emerging as a public treasure.

Succeeding generations loved and honored the Stars and Stripes, but this flag in particular provided a unique connection to the national narrative. Once it was moved to the Smithsonian Institution in 1907, it remained on almost continuous display. After almost 200 years of service, the flag had slowly deteriorated almost to the point of no return. Removed from exhibit in 1998 for a conservation project that cost about $7 million, the Star-Spangled Banner, as it had become known, returns to center stage with the reopening of the renovated National Museum of American History on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

Its long journey from obscurity began on a blazing July day in 1813, when Mary Pickersgill, a hardworking widow known as one of the best flag makers in Baltimore, received a rush order from Maj. George Armistead. Newly installed as commander of Fort McHenry, the 33-year-old officer wanted an enormous banner, 30 by 42 feet, to be flown over the federal garrison guarding the entrance to Baltimore's waterfront.

There was some urgency to Armistead's request. The United States had declared war in June 1812 to settle its disputed northern and western borders and stop the British from impressing American seamen; the British, annoyed by American privateering against their merchant ships, readily took up the challenge. As the summer of 1813 unfolded, the enemies were trading blows across the Canadian border. Then British war vessels appeared in the Chesapeake Bay, menacing shipping, destroying local batteries and burning buildings up and down the estuary. As Baltimore prepared for war, Armistead ordered his big new flag—one the British would be able to see from miles away. It would signal that the fort was occupied and prepared to defend the harbor.

Pickersgill got right to work. With her daughter Caroline and others, she wrestled more than 300 yards of English worsted wool bunting to the floor of Claggett's brewery, the only space in her East Baltimore neighborhood large enough to accommodate the project, and started measuring, snipping and fitting.

To make the flag's stripes, she overlapped and stitched eight strips of red wool and alternated them with seven strips of undyed white wool. While the bunting was manufactured in 18-inch widths, the stripes in her design were each two feet wide, so she had to splice in an extra six inches all the way across. She did it so smoothly that the completed product would look like a finished whole—and not like the massive patchwork it was. A rectangle of deep blue, about 16 by 21 feet, formed the flag's canton, or upper left quarter. Sitting on the brewery floor, she stitched a scattering of five-pointed stars into the canton. Each one, fashioned from white cotton, was almost two feet across. Then she turned the flag over and snipped out blue material from the backs of the stars, tightly binding the edges; this made the stars visible from either side.

Caroline Pickersgill Purdy recalled years later, "My mother worked many nights until 12 o'clock to complete it in the given time." By mid-August, the work was done—a supersize version of the Stars and Stripes. Unlike the 13-star ensign first authorized by Congress on June 14, 1777, this one had 15 stars to go with the 15 stripes, acknowledging the Union's latest additions, Vermont and Kentucky.

Mary Pickersgill delivered the finished flag on August 19, 1813, along with a junior version. The smaller flag, 17 by 25 feet, was to be flown in inclement weather, saving wear and tear on the more expensive one, not to mention the men who hoisted the unwieldy monster up the flagpole.

The government paid $405.90 for the big flag, $168.54 for the storm version (roughly $5,500 and $2,300, respectively, in today's currency). For a widow who had to make her own way, Pickersgill lived well, eventually buying a brick house on East Pratt Street, supporting her mother and daughter there and furnishing the place with luxuries such as floor coverings of painted sailcloth. "Baltimore was a very good place to have a flag business," says Jean Ehmann, a guide who shows visitors around the Pickersgill house, now a National Historic Landmark known as the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House. "Ships were coming and going from around the world. All of them needed flags—company flags, signal flags, country flags."

With the end of the Civil War and the approach of the nation's centennial in 1876, Georgiana Appleton (Maj. George Armistead's daughter) was pressed by visitors who wanted to see the flag and by patriots wishing to borrow it for ceremonies. She obliged as many of them as she thought reasonable, even allowing some to snip fragments from the banner as souvenirs. Just how many became obvious in 1873, when the flag was photographed for the first time, hanging from a third-floor window at the Boston Navy Yard.

It was a sad sight. Red stripes had split from their seams, drooping away from white ones; much of the bunting appeared to be threadbare; the banner was riddled with holes, from wear and tear, insect damage—and perhaps combat; a star was gone from the canton. The rectangular flag that Mary Pickersgill had delivered to Fort McHenry was now almost square, having lost about eight feet of material. "Flags have a hard life," says Suzanne Thomassen-Krauss, chief conservator of the Star-Spangled Banner Project at the National Museum of American History. "The amount of wind damage that happens in a very short time is a major culprit in the deterioration of flags."

Thomassen-Krauss suggests that this banner's fly end, the part that flies free, was probably in tatters when the Armistead family took possession of it. By the time it reached Boston for its 1873 photo op, the ragged end had been trimmed and bound with thread to contain further deterioration. According to Thomassen-Krauss, fly end remnants were likely used to patch more than 30 other parts of the flag. Other trimmings were probably the source for most of the souvenirs the Armisteads handed out. "Pieces of the flag have occasionally been given to those who [were] deemed to have a right to such a memento," Georgiana Appleton acknowledged in 1873. "Indeed, had we given all that we had been importuned for, little would be left to show." Contrary to widespread belief, the flag's missing star was taken out not by shrapnel or rocket fire, but most likely by scissors. It was "cut out for some official person," Georgiana wrote, though she never named the recipient.

The 1873 photograph reveals another telling detail: the presence of a prominent red chevron stitched into the sixth stripe from the bottom. The voluble Georgiana Appleton never explained it. But historians have suggested it might have been a monogram—in the form of the letter "A" from which the cross-bar has been dropped or was never pieced in, placed there to signify the Armisteads' strong sense of ownership.

That familial pride burned bright in Georgiana Appleton, who fretted over the banner's well-being even as she lent it out, snipped pieces from it and grew old along with a family relic that had come into being only four years before she did. She lamented that it was "just fading away." So was she. When she died at age 60 in 1878, she left the flag to a son, Eben Appleton.

Like family members before him, Eben Appleton—33 at the time he took possession of the flag—felt a keen responsibility to safeguard what, by then, had become a national treasure, much in demand for patriotic celebrations. Aware of its fragile state, he was reluctant to part with it. Indeed, it would appear that he lent it out only once, when the flag made its last public appearance of the 19th century, appropriately enough in Baltimore.

The occasion was the city's sesquicentennial, celebrated October 13, 1880. The parade that day included nine men in top hats and black suits—the last of those who had fought under the banner in 1814. The flag itself, bundled into the lap of a local historian named William W. Carter, rode in a carriage, drawing cheers, a newspaper reported, "as the tattered old relic was seen by the crowds." When the festivities ended, Appleton packed it up and returned to his home in New York City.

There he continued to field requests from civic leaders and patriotic groups, who grew exasperated when he turned them down. When a committee of Baltimoreans publicly questioned whether the Armisteads legally owned the banner, Appleton was infuriated. He locked it in a bank vault, declined to disclose its location, kept his address secret and refused to discuss the flag with anyone, "having been much annoyed about his heirloom all his life," according to a sister. "People were banging on his door, bothering him all the time to borrow the flag," says Anna Van Lunz, curator at the Fort McHenry historical monument. "He became kind of a recluse."

Eben Appleton shipped the flag to Washington in July 1907, relieved to entrust his family's inheritance—and its attendant responsibility—to the Smithsonian Institution. Initially a loan, Appleton made the transaction permanent in 1912. At that point, his family's flag became the nation's.

The Smithsonian has kept the flag on almost continuous public view even while fretting about its condition. "This sacred relic is but a frail piece of bunting, worn, frayed, pierced and largely in tatters," Assistant Secretary Richard Rathbun said in 1913.

In 1914, the Institution engaged restorer Amelia Fowler to shore up its most prized possession. Commandeering space in the Smithsonian Castle, she set ten needle-women to work removing the heavy canvas backing that had been attached to the flag in 1873 and, with some 1.7 million stitches, painstakingly attaching a new backing of Irish linen. Her work kept the flag from falling apart for nearly a century, as it was displayed in the Arts and Industries Building until 1964, then in the Museum of History and Technology, later renamed the National Museum of American History.

The song the banner inspired had become a regular feature at ballgames and patriotic events by the early 20th century. Around the same time, veterans groups launched a campaign to have Key's composition formally designated as the national anthem. By 1930, five million citizens had signed a petition in support of the idea, and after veterans recruited a pair of sopranos to sing the song before the House Judiciary Committee, Congress adopted "The Star-Spangled Banner" as the national anthem the next year.

Conservators cleaned it with a solution of water and acetone, removing contaminants and reducing acidity in the fabric. During a delicate operation that took 18 months, they removed Amelia Fowler's linen backing. Then they attached—to the other side of the flag—a new backing made of a sheer polyester fabric called Stabiltex. As a result, visitors will see a side of the flag that had been hidden from view since 1873.

These high-tech attentions have stabilized the flag and prepared it for a new display room at the heart of the renovated museum. There the flag that began life on a brewery floor is sealed in a pressurized chamber. Monitored by sensors, shielded by glass, guarded by a waterless fire-suppression system and soothed by temperature and humidity controls, it lies on a custom-built table that allows conservators to care for it without having to move it. "We really want this to be the last time it's handled," says Thomassen-Krauss. "It's getting too fragile for moving and handling." So the old flag survives, bathed in dim light, floating out of the darkness, just as it did on that uncertain morning at Fort McHenry.

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