(I don't know why the link isn't working here's the url: http://www.amazon.com/Flying-Cheese-Stories-Ordinary-Volume/dp/1480262773)
Happy Fourth, everyone!
Mary Pickersgill's
Flag
Pickersgill. It’s an unusual name.
Unusual, but fitting, for Mary Pickersgill was given an unusual task.
In the midst of The
War of 1812 between the British and the Americans, Mary Pickersgill, a widowed
Baltimore flag maker, was asked to sew a flag. But not just an ordinary flag. Major
George Armistead wanted a big flag, a very big flag, to fly over Fort McHenry at the entrance
to Baltimore Harbor. So Mary and her 13-year-old daughter, Caroline, spent weeks in the summer of 1813
assembling a flag measuring 30 feet by 42
feet. That's as big as almost 30 ping pong tables.
By September of 1814, the British had
burned Washington, D.C., and were bombing Fort McHenry from land and sea. An American attorney was watching the battle
from aboard a British ship, having
just negotiated the release of an elderly physician who had been taken captive. The battle continued into the night
until the British abandoned the attack, judging it would be too costly to
complete the task. As the smoke cleared and the sun rose, this attorney saw Mary Pickersgill's flag flying over Fort
McHenry. He was inspired to write
these words:
Oh, say can you
see,
By the dawn's early
light,
What so proudly we
hailed at the twilights' last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes
and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we
watched, were so gallantly streaming?
Yes, Mary
Pickersgill's flag became known as the Star Spangled Banner. The flag survives to this day and hangs in the
Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. Mary
Pickersgill's home has been converted into a museum called Flag House.
Pickersgill. It is
an unusual name. But it's a name forever linked with The Star Spangled Banner, an unforgettable flag.
Source: Honor Our Flag, David Singleton, The
Globe Pequot Press, 2002
(c) Rebecca K. Grosenbach
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