The Star-Spangled Banner
Mary Pickersgill (1776 to 1857) · 1813
In a darkened chamber at the centre of the building, a vast, faded flag lies at a gentle angle behind glass, lit so softly that your eyes take a moment to adjust. Fifteen stripes and fifteen stars, a star and a stripe for each state in the Union of 1813, cover an area the size of a small house. It is the flag that flew over Fort McHenry in Baltimore harbour on the morning of the fourteenth of September 1814, after a night of British bombardment, and that the lawyer Francis Scott Key saw from a ship in the harbour when he wrote the verses that became the national anthem. Its enormous size was deliberate; the fort's commander wanted a flag the British would have no difficulty seeing.
The flag was sewn in the summer of 1813 by Mary Pickersgill, a Baltimore flag maker, with her daughter, nieces and an indentured African American girl, working on the floor of a brewery because the flag was too big for her house. Look at the stripes closely: the wool bunting is loosely woven English cloth, and the stars are cotton, cut out and sewn in on both sides. One star is missing. It was cut out as a souvenir in the nineteenth century, along with about two and a half metres of the fly end, given away in pieces by the family that owned it.
The flag came to the Smithsonian in 1907 and was hung vertically for most of the twentieth century, which slowly tore its own weight apart. Between 1999 and 2008 conservators removed a linen backing sewn on in 1914, cleaned every square centimetre and laid the flag at its present shallow angle in a chamber with controlled light, humidity and temperature, so that it will survive another century. The photograph here shows it on display in the 1960s. Today it is seen only in the dim chamber, and no photography is allowed inside.
Did You Know? The flag was sewn on the floor of a Baltimore brewery because no room in the flag maker's house was large enough.
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