Fort McHenry

Maryland Historical Society

Baltimore flag maker Mary Young Pickersgill sewed the enormous “star-spangled banner” that flew over Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore. In 1813, under the threat of British attack, the fort’s commander Major George Armistead paid Mary Pickersgill $409.50 to make two flags. The larger flag was to measure 30 by 42 feet so that it could be seen from a distance.

During six weeks in July and August 1813, Mary, her daughter Caroline, and their assistants, hand-stitched sections of the flag. To assemble the pieces, the women laid them out across the floor of Clagett’s Brewery at Lombard and Granby Streets in east Baltimore. The completed flag required 400 yards of woolen bunting and more than a million stitches. Each of its 15 stripes measured two feet wide; its 15 stars were two feet across.

In September 1814, the English attacked the fort. When the two-day bombardment was over, Mary Pickersgill’s expertly stitched flag still waved, signaling that Baltimore refused to surrender. Early the next morning, Francis Scott Key saw the flag and composed the poem that would become the United States’ national anthem.

Born in Philadelphia in 1776, Mary Young, lived in Baltimore and in Philadelphia and, in 1795, married John Pickersgill. After her husband’s death, she settled in Baltimore, taking up the profession of her mother, Rebecca Young, who had sewn flags and standards for the Continental Army, the Pennsylvania Navy, and the First United States Regiment. The harbor city of Baltimore proved an excellent location for Mary Pickersgill’s enterprise. Working from her home, she designed and sewed signals and flags for merchant ships and for U.S. Navy and U.S. Army ships and forts.

After several years, Pickersgill had established herself professionally and turned her attention to philanthropy. As President of the Impartial Female Humane Society, Pickersgill helped impoverished women find jobs, sent their children to school, and contributed money for homes for the elderly. Today, the society she aided is called the Pickersgill Retirement Community.

Mary Pickersgill died in 1857 and was buried in the Loudon Park Cemetery in Baltimore.
The flag she made, one of the nation’s greatest treasures, remained in the Armistead family for several generations before the Smithsonian Institution acquired it in 1907. Today visitors may view the flag in a special preservation laboratory at the National Museum of American History, where a team of conservators is restoring it. Mary Pickersgill’s house at 844 E. Pratt Street, the Flag House and Star-Spangled Banner Museum, is a historic landmark.

Furlong, William R. and Byron McCandless. So Proudly We Hail: The History of the United States Flag. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981.

Sheads, Scott S. Guardian of the Star-Spangled Banner. Maryland: Toomey Press, 1999.