Flag order kept makers in stitches

Banner: Hired to create a symbol for Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, Mary Pickersgill created a legacy.

CLARIFICATION

An illustration in yesterday's Today section of Mary Pickersgill sewing the flag that inspired the "Star-Spangled Banner" should have been credited to the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House of Baltimore.

Maj. George Armistead sounded as cocky as a Marine recruit just out of boot camp when he took command of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812.

"We, sir," he told Gen. Sam Smith, head of the Baltimore militia, "are ready at Fort McHenry to defend Baltimore against invading by the enemy." The enemy was no less than the expanding British Empire and the army and navy that had just defeated Napoleon.

"That is to say," Armistead went on, "we are ready except that we have no suitable ensign to display over the Star Fort and it is my desire to have a flag so large that the British will have no difficulty seeing it from a distance."

So Armistead commissioned a flag from Mary Young Pickersgill, a widow who supported herself and a fairly large household by making flags, ships' colors and banners at the rowhouse that still stands at President and East Pratt streets.

He ordered a flag that turned out to be big enough to be seen at dawn's early light by Francis Scott Key when the British finally did attack Fort McHenry and Baltimore - the flag that became the Star Spangled Banner and perhaps the most famous flag in America's history.

Irvin Molotsky, a veteran reporter and editor with the New York Times, retells the story in an engaging new book out just in time for tomorrow's Flag Day - "The Flag, the Poet & the Song: The Story of the Star-Spangled Banner."

Molotsky says Mary Pickersgill made the flag of 400 yards of good English wool bunting 30 feet tall and 42 feet long, which may have been the largest battle flag ever flown. It weighed 80 pounds, relatively light for 1,260 square feet.

He seems to have found Mrs. Pickersgill quite likable.

"How can you not be?" he says during a phone conversation from his summer job as editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris. He retired in April after 34 years with the Times, "21 odd" in the Washington bureau.

"Mary was very popular in the society of her time," according to a Flag House history quoted in his book. "Her home was the scene of many gay entertainments. She was considered a woman of charm, culture and personality, vivacious and public spirited."

She's a round-face, motherly woman in a portrait at the Flag House, which was her home when it was 60 Albemarle St., at the edge of the harbor. It's now a National Historical Landmark that Molotsky calls "a splendid little museum."

She was born Feb. 12, 1776, in Philadelphia, where her widowed mother, Rebecca Young, was a flag maker. Pickersgill died at home Oct. 4, 1857.

The band of seamstresses she assembled to make the Star-Spangled Banner included her 13-year-old daughter, Caroline, perhaps her aged mother, a couple of cousins and probably an African- American servant and a slave.

Molotsky notes the irony that both Pickersgill and Francis Scott Key owned slaves, when the anthem speaks repeatedly of "the land of the free."

Pickersgill and her covey took six weeks to make the flag, working mostly at her home, then when it got too big, at Clagett's brewery, which was about a block away at what is now Brewer's Park at President and East Lombard streets.

The flag had fifteen stars, each about twice as big as a man's head, and fifteen stripes, eight red and seven white, although there were eighteen states in 1813. Congress had frozen the number of stars and stripes after Kentucky's admission to the Union in 1792.

Sally Johnston, executive director of the Flag House, told Molotsky that Pickersgill and her team sewed the flag together with 350,000 stitches.

"That's 350,000 stitches, hand-sewn, one-by-one," he says.

Pickersgill turned the battle flag over to Armistead on Aug. 13, 1813, along with a smaller storm flag that measured 17-by-25 feet. She was paid $405.90 for the big one, $3,400 in today's money, Molotsky says, and $168.54 for the storm flag.

Her niece, Eliza Young, signed the receipt, perhaps at Pickersgill's handsome desk, which survives at the Flag House, along with her clock, a hot-chocolate pitcher and a tea set.

After his successful defense of Fort McHenry, George Armistead may have been presented with the battle flag - or maybe he just took it home. In any event, it remained in his family until his grandson gave it to the Smithsonian Institution in 1912.

Conservators at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, where the flag has hung since 1963, are working on a preservation project that will take two more years to complete.

The family took pretty good care of it, preservationists say. But it is eight or nine feet smaller than when it flew over Fort McHenry. Swatches were cut off as souvenirs and there is a persistent story that the widow of a veteran of the bombardment asked for a piece to be buried with him. Three pieces - one each of red, white and blue - are on display at the Flag House.