Mary Young Pickersgill Flag Maker of the Star-Spangled Banner

By Pat Pilling and Sally Johnston

Mary Pickersgill and the Star-Spangled Banner tells the story of how a young widow in the summer of 1813 made two large flags for Fort McHenry in Baltimore. The young United States was at war with Great Britain, and Fort McHenry prepared for an attack from the British. All was ready at the fort except for a proper set of flags. George Armistead, commander at Fort McHenry, needed the hand sewn flags in a hurry giving Mary Pickersgill just six weeks to produce them. This book will explain how Mary Pickersgill learned to make flags, where she obtained the four hundred yards of fabric, woven only in England, to make the flag, how she organized a small work force of young women, including a free African-American indentured servant, to sew the flags and where she found a workplace to make such large flags. Surprisingly, Mary Pickersgill did not consider sewing the Star-Spangled Banner the greatest accomplishment of her life. Under her leadership, a Baltimore charitable organization helped poor widows find work to support their families. The organization raised the funds to build the Home for Aged Widows that opened with great publicity and fanfare six years before Mary Pickersgill died. The Pickersgill Retirement Home in Towson has its roots in Mary Pickersgills crowning achievement of her lifetime.

The stirring history of Mary Pickersgills family is included in the book and helps explain Mary Pickersgills drive and determination to produce the flags for Fort McHenry when the city of Baltimore was under imminent attack. The book also describes how the Star-Spangled Banner became the most important object in the Smithsonians vast collection. In addition, the book recounts the history of the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House Association that preserved the little house on the corner of Pratt and Albemarle Streets as a museum to honor Mary Pickersgills legacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Oct 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496943170

Pat Pilling

Sally Johnston grew up in Maine and majored in history at Chatham College. After receiving her masters degree at the University of Pittsburgh, she taught in Pittsburgh before moving to Baltimore in 1971. Sally was director of the Star-Spangled Banner Flag House and worked at many of Baltimore’s historic sites. In 2010, she and Lois Zanow wrote and published Monuments to Heaven: Baltimore's Historic Houses of Worship. Trained as an educator, Pat Pilling has always enjoyed hunting for historical truths hidden in libraries, attics, and archives. For almost twenty years, the hunt for facts about Mary Pickersgill and her family have been alluring project. Pat and her husband, Ron, wrote Pickersgill Retirement Community: Two Centuries of Service to Baltimore 1802–2002.

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© 2014 Sally Johnston; Pat Pilling All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 10/23/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-4231-9 (sc)

978-1-4969-4317-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014917987

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Cover: Mary Pickersgill Placing the Stars, R. McGill Mackall,(1889 - 1982) oil on canvas, 1962, Flag House Collection

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Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Setting Up Shop: Baltimore, 1806

Chapter 2: The Flag House

Chapter 3: A Family of Flag Makers

Chapter 4: Mary Pickersgill and the Star-Spangled Banner

Chapter 5: The Battle of Baltimore

Chapter 6: The Impartial Female Humane Society

Chapter 7: Caroline Purdy

Chapter 8: Stewardship of the Star-Spangled Banner

Chapter 9: The Flag House Association

Appendices

A: Mary Pickersgill’s Family

B: John Pickersgill

C: William Young, Flag Maker

D: Early American Flag Makers Data Sheet

Works Cited

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

About the Book

Preface

T his book emerged from my adventures as a teacher, museum volunteer and director, and amateur historian. When I moved to Baltimore more than thirty years ago, I learned about Mary Pickersgill, the woman who sewed the flag that flew over Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore in 1814. That flag inspired the writing of what became our country’s national anthem. I first visited the Flag House Museum in 1973. Many years later, I became its director, and I served in that capacity from 1996 until 2004.

Pat Pilling and I met while working at the Baltimore City Life Museums (BCLM), and when BCLM closed, she joined me at the Flag House. The more we learned about Mary Pickersgill, who lived in the Flag House, the more we became fascinated with her life, her family’s early history in Philadelphia, and their involvement in the Revolutionary War, with connections to George Washington, Benjamin Flower, and other important figures in the country’s early history.

Every detail of Mary Pickersgill’s life intrigued us. Growing up in Philadelphia, Mary Pickersgill learned to make flags from her mother, an important flag maker during and after the Revolutionary War. She traveled to Baltimore with her mother to visit relatives, and met her husband, John Pickersgill, an English merchant, there. After being widowed, Mary Pickersgill and her mother opened a flag-making shop in Baltimore in 1806. The two women imported cloth from England to make flags, enlisted the young women in their house to sew flags, and were well established in 1813 when Fort McHenry needed a flag. The flag Mary Pickersgill sewed is known today as the Star-Spangled Banner.

After retiring from flag making, Mary Pickersgill spent her time volunteering in a charitable organization that helped impoverished widows. She served as president of that organization, the Impartial Female Humane Society, for more than twenty-five years and oversaw the construction of the first home for elderly widows in Baltimore. Pat Pilling and her husband, Ron, wrote a history of this society in 2002, entitled Pickersgill Retirement Community: Two Centuries of Service to Baltimore, 1802–2002. From early childhood to old age, Mary Pickersgill lived a remarkable life.

Pat Pilling organized research trips to the National Archives, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and to the Library Company, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Public Library in Philadelphia. The Enoch Pratt Library and Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore and the Maryland Archives in Annapolis were also good hunting grounds for information about Mary Pickersgill and her family. We compiled notebooks filled with information and copies of documents. Pat, an accomplished genealogist, did extensive research on Mary Pickersgill’s relatives, covering a number of generations.

Much to our surprise, the small Flag House archives were filled with important documents, including the receipt for making the Star-Spangled Banner, letters from Mary Pickersgill’s relatives, and even letters from Benjamin Rush, a family friend. The collection included objects belonging to Mary Pickersgill and a portrait of her uncle, Benjamin Flower, painted by Charles Willson Peale, the most noted portrait artist of his day. We love primary documents and have included many in this book. Their language, style, and information reveal so much about the people in Mary Pickersgill’s story.

I traveled to Lebanon and Allentown, Pennsylvania, sites where Mary Pickersgill and her family lived during the Revolution, and recently traveled to Sudbury, England, where the fabric used to make the Star-Spangled Banner was manufactured. We held symposia on flag history, wrote a guide book for the Flag House, and became acquainted with the park rangers at Fort McHenry, who were interested in Mary Pickersgill. A backdrop to all this activity were the plans to build a new museum at the Flag House to expand the space to tell the story of Mary Pickersgill and the Star-Spangled Banner.

Serendipitously, while we were busily and happily uncovering the history surrounding Mary Pickersgill and her flag-making family, the Smithsonian Institution undertook the massive job of conserving the Star-Spangled Banner and installing it into a new exhibit at the Museum of American History. Suddenly, Mary Pickersgill the flag maker and the Flag House where she made the flag received welcome attention. We were overjoyed to see Mary Pickersgill receive her rightful place in the new exhibit surrounding the flag.

This book is a culmination of all our work and obsession with the history of Mary Pickersgill, her family, and the Star-Spangled Banner. Her childhood in Philadelphia, the devastating effects of the Revolutionary War on her family, the strength and resolve of her mother facing adversity, the talent to establish a successful flag-making business in Baltimore, the life-long support Mary Pickersgill received from her family and gave to them in return, and her interest in improving the lives of poor women in difficult circumstances are the bedrock of her life. This is the time to publish her contribution to American history, during the celebration of the Bicentennial of the War of 1812. Her exhilarating story is sewn right into the fabric of the Star-Spangled Banner.

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Warner and Hanna’s Plan of the City and Environs of Baltimore by Charles Varle, 1801. Courtesy of the Sheridan Library, Johns Hopkins University.

CHAPTER 1

Setting Up Shop: Baltimore, 1806

B altimore was a booming city in the early nineteenth century, almost doubling its population between 1800 and 1810 from 26,500 citizens to 46,500 citizens. ¹ For a short time, it was the third largest city in the United States. Wheat was a key to this growth. After the Revolutionary War, farmers began growing wheat in western Maryland. Wagonloads of wheat rumbled over the rough roads of the countryside to flour mills that had sprung up along the streams leading to Baltimore’s harbor. Turning the wheat into flour increased its value. Ships crowded Baltimore’s harbor waiting to sail to England and Europe with their holds filled with bags of flour.

Mary Pickersgill and her mother, Rebecca Young, both flag makers, moved from Philadelphia to Baltimore in 1806 with Mary’s daughter, Caroline. Both women were widows and wanted to be close to their relatives. Baltimore proved to be an excellent place for these two experienced flag makers. The high volume of shipping meant that there was great demand for ships flags, merchant flags, and signal flags. In addition, there was a strong need for military colours for militia groups that were springing up everywhere as a result of tensions between the young United States and England. The powerful British navy was interfering with the profitable merchant trade between the United States and France, raising concern of the possibility of a second war between the two nations. Militia groups formed in anticipation of the likelihood of war. The city resounded with the sound of fife and drum as the militia groups, exhibiting their colours, trained and paraded.

Rebecca Young, who had advertised her flag-making business in Philadelphia, lost no time doing the same after arriving in Baltimore. On June 19, 1806, the American Commercial Daily Advertiser carried an advertisement on