Betsy Ross

Betsy Griscom was born the eighth of 17 children to a Quaker family in Philadelphia, and only nine of her siblings survived to adulthood. Her father apprenticed her to the upholsterer William Webster, who taught her to sew bed hangings, chair coverings, and window blinds — a trade, not a symbol. At 21 she eloped across the Delaware River with a fellow apprentice, John Ross, marrying outside the Quaker faith. Philadelphia's Arch Street Meeting expelled her for it. The couple opened their own upholstery shop instead, just as a war was starting that would soon make upholsterers useful to armies as well as parlors.

What the record supports: on May 29, 1777, the Pennsylvania Navy Board paid her 14 pounds and 12 shillings for making ship's colors, and she kept making flags for the state and for the U.S. Arsenal on the Schuylkill into her 70s. What it does not support is the story everyone knows — that George Washington, Robert Morris, and George Ross came to her shop in 1776 to commission the first flag, and that she talked Washington into a five-pointed star. No document from the Revolutionary era mentions it. The story surfaced in 1870, when her grandson William Canby told it to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, citing a family conversation from 1857, 20 years after Ross had died. The 1876 centennial and a popular 1893 painting made it a national fixture regardless.

Marriage cost her a religious community, and twice, a husband. John Ross died within two years of the wedding, possibly in a gunpowder explosion while guarding munitions. Her second husband, the privateersman Joseph Ashburn, was captured by the Royal Navy in 1780 and died in an English prison in 1782 — she did not learn of it for months. Two of her five children died in infancy. Her third husband, John Claypoole, had been imprisoned alongside Ashburn and came home with injuries that left him disabled for the last two decades of his life, which she nursed him through. She buried her parents and a sister in the 1793 yellow fever epidemic, went blind in old age, and outlived all three husbands before dying at 84.

The house Philadelphia sells as hers is itself disputed — the best evidence puts her next door, in a building since demolished — and when workers searched for her remains in 1975 ahead of the Bicentennial, they found no body under her tombstone and reburied whatever bones turned up nearby in the family plot. Historians have spent the decades since stripping the legend to what holds up: a widow who ran an upholstery business through a war and did make flags for the government, alongside several other Philadelphia seamstresses, just not the first one and not for Washington personally. Her biographer Marla Miller argues that the ordinary tradeswoman is the better story anyway.

Betsy Ross's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Pennsylvania Navy ship's colors other
  The only Revolutionary-era flag work documented in her own name 1777
• Tents, blankets, and cartridge tubes for the Continental Army other
  Wartime manufacturing alongside her flag and upholstery work 1779
• Garrison flags for the U.S. Arsenal, Schuylkill River other
  Fifty flags, made in her late 50s 1811
• The Ross-Claypoole upholstery shop company
  Ran continuously for more than 50 years, through three marriages 1773

• January 1, 1752 aged 0 Born in Gloucester City, New Jersey
• 1773 aged ~21 Elopes with John Ross and is expelled from the Quaker meeting
• 1775 aged ~23 John Ross dies, possibly in a gunpowder explosion
• May 29, 1777 aged 25 Paid by the Pennsylvania Navy Board for making ship's colors The only Revolutionary-era document that names her flag work.
• 1782 aged ~30 Second husband Joseph Ashburn dies in an English prison
• May 1783 aged 31 Marries John Claypoole, her third husband
• January 30, 1836 aged 84 Dies in Philadelphia at 84
• 1870 aged ~118 Grandson William Canby tells the flag story to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania He said he first heard it from an aunt in 1857, 20 years after Ross's death.
• 1893 A Chicago World's Fair painting fixes the myth in the popular imagination

• George Washington 1732–1799
  First President of the United States and commander of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. credited her in the disputed legend
• Dolley Madison 1768–1849
  First Lady who built the political salon of early Washington and saved the Washington portrait in 1814. fellow Philadelphia-era woman
• Abigail Adams 1744–1818
  Correspondent and presidential spouse whose letters urged legal consideration for women in the new republic. contemporary of the founding generation
• John Adams 1735–1826
  Second President and key Founding Father who helped secure independence and shaped early American diplomacy. Philadelphia contemporary