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    "headline": "Did Betsy Ross sew the first American flag? The story first appeared 94 years later, from her grandson",
    "description": "William Canby's 1870 paper rests on family memory, while an October 27, 1780 Treasury report shows Francis Hopkinson asking Congress to pay him for the flag's design.",
    "datePublished": "2026-10-27T14:09:00+00:00",
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    "articleSection": "History",
    "keywords": "American flag, American Revolution, Betsy Ross, Francis Hopkinson",
    "articleBody": "The first written account of Betsy Ross sewing the first American flag was read aloud in Philadelphia in March 1870, by her grandson William J. Canby, before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. That is roughly 94 years after the 1776 meeting it describes, and 34 years after Ross died. Every later version of the story, from schoolbooks to a 1952 postage stamp, flows from that paper and the family statements behind it. So did she make it? The honest answer is that nobody can prove it, the evidence that survives points elsewhere for the design, and one small piece of the legend is better supported than the rest. What Canby actually claimed, and on what basis Canby’s paper is unusually frank about its own foundations. He reports that he searched the printed Journals of Congress, Philadelphia’s libraries and, with special permission, the State Department’s archives in Washington. He found nothing on who designed or made the flag beyond the resolution of June 14, 1777, which set out thirteen stripes, “alternate red and white,” and thirteen stars on blue. With the record silent, he turned to tradition. He wrote that a “well sustained tradition” in the family credited Elizabeth Claypoole, the name Ross carried after her third marriage, with having “made with her own hands the first flag.” His witnesses were three surviving daughters, who he conceded spoke “not from their own knowledge, for the flag was made before they were born,” and a niece, Margaret Boggs, then in her 95th year. He had taken down the account of the eldest daughter, Clarissa Wilson, in 1857. In Canby’s telling, several gentlemen who announced themselves as a committee of Congress, among them George Washington and Col. George Ross, called at her Arch Street upholstery shop. Ross showed a rough drawing with six-pointed stars. She proposed five points, folded a sheet of paper and produced one with a single snip, and Washington redrew the design in pencil in her back parlor. The famous reply comes in two versions Ross’s answer to the committee is the closest thing this story has to a quotation, and its wording shifts depending on where you read it. Canby’s 1870 paper gives it as indirect speech: “she did not know but she could try; she had never made one but if the pattern were shown to her she had not doubt of her ability to do it.” Historic Philadelphia, which runs the Betsy Ross House, quotes a crisper first-person line from the family affidavits: “I do not know, but I will try.” Both trace to the same relatives, decades after the event. Neither was written down by anyone who was in the room. What the 18th-century paperwork does show May 29, 1777: The Pennsylvania Navy Board orders a payment to Elizabeth Ross of “fourteen pounds twelve shillings and two pence for Making Ships Colours,” flags for the Pennsylvania navy. It is the strongest contemporary proof that she sewed flags in wartime. June 14, 1777: Congress adopts the stars-and-stripes resolution. It names no designer and no maker. May 25, 1780: Francis Hopkinson, a New Jersey signer of the Declaration and former chairman of the Navy Board, writes to the Board of Admiralty listing designs he had produced, among them “the Flag of the United States of America,” and asks for “a Quarter Cask of the public Wine” as his reward. October 27, 1780: The Board of Treasury rejects his request for payment, on the grounds that he had not been the only person consulted on the designs. That last entry turns 246 years old this week, and it cuts both ways. Hopkinson is the only person known to have claimed the flag design during the Revolution, and scholars broadly accept that he drew one. Yet the board’s refusal is also a reminder that other hands were involved, even if it names none of them. No sketch of a Hopkinson flag survives. None of this rules out Ross sewing an early stars-and-stripes flag. She was one of several Philadelphia flag makers working for the military, and she kept at it for more than 50 years, including over 50 garrison flags for the US Arsenal on the Schuylkill River in 1811. Historic Philadelphia also points to newer findings, among them records at Mount Vernon showing that she and her first husband, John Ross, made bed hangings for Washington in 1774, which would mean he knew her work. What turned a family memory into a national fact came later. The story spread as the 1876 centennial approached, and in 1893 the painter Charles H. Weisgerber showed Birth of Our Nation’s Flag at the Chicago World’s Fair. He went on to buy the Arch Street house, raise money nationwide to keep it open and mail out copies of the picture. Historians still dispute whether Ross actually lived in that building. The verdict that fits the documents: Ross was a real, paid flag maker of the Revolution; the first-flag scene rests on her family’s word alone; and the design credit that survives in writing belongs to Hopkinson. The resolution she is linked to reaches its 250th anniversary on Flag Day, June 14, 2027. Further reading Wikipedia: Betsy Ross Wikipedia: Francis Hopkinson Image: Charles H. Weisgerber, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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