Mary Pickersgill

Mary Young Pickersgill was born in 1776 in Philadelphia, the daughter of Rebecca Young, herself a flagmaker who had sewn military flags for the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. She grew up learning the trade, absorbing the technical skills of cutting, sewing, and finishing large textile commissions that required both precision and physical strength. After her husband's death left her a widow with a daughter to support, she established herself in Baltimore as a professional maker of maritime flags — the signal ensigns, naval jacks, and garrison flags that were standard commercial products for a busy port city in the early nineteenth century. Her professional reputation in Baltimore was strong enough that she received a commission for one of the most demanding flagmaking projects in American history.

In the summer of 1813, the commanders of Fort McHenry commissioned Pickersgill to sew two flags: a smaller storm flag and an enormous garrison flag measuring thirty by forty-two feet, intended to fly over the fort as a visible symbol of American defiance during any British attack. The garrison flag was so large that Pickersgill and her team — which included her daughter, nieces, and an African American servant — could not lay it out in full in her house on Pratt Street; they obtained permission to use the floor of a nearby brewery's malthouse to cut and stitch the fifteen stripes and fifteen stars of the enormous commission. The work took weeks and required extraordinary skill to keep the massive sections aligned and the stitching strong enough to survive heavy weather.

On the night of September 13 to 14, 1814, the garrison flag that Pickersgill had sewn flew over Fort McHenry through the British bombardment that Francis Scott Key witnessed from a truce vessel in the Patapsco River, inspiring the verses that became the national anthem. The flag and the woman who made it thus entered American cultural memory together, though Pickersgill received little recognition during her lifetime beyond her professional fees. She went on to become a prominent Baltimore philanthropist, co-founding the Impartial Female Humane Society, and died in 1857. Her Pratt Street house has been preserved as the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House, a museum dedicated to her craft and her extraordinary commission.