The story that Betsy Ross sewed the first Stars and Stripes was not told in public until 1870, almost a century after it is supposed to have happened. That year her grandson, William J. Canby, read a paper to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania claiming that George Washington, Robert Morris and George Ross, a member of Congress and the uncle of her late husband, called at her upholstery shop on Arch Street in the late spring of 1776 with a rough design. In the family account, Washington's sketch had six-pointed stars, and Ross showed the visitors how to cut a five-pointed star with a single snip of the scissors. Canby had no documents, only sworn statements from elderly relatives, among them her daughter Rachel Fletcher, then 82.
Canby could find no record that the Continental Congress had any committee to design a flag in the spring of 1776, and Congress did not adopt the Stars and Stripes until 14 June 1777. The firmest document is a payment to Ross from the Pennsylvania State Navy Board on 29 May 1777 for making flags, Pennsylvania naval colours rather than the Stars and Stripes. The historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich argues there is no point asking who made the first flag, because there was not one.
The story spread anyway. Charles Weisgerber's painting The Birth of Our Nation's Flag was seen by millions at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, and the Betsy Ross Memorial Association sold ten cent subscriptions, each buyer receiving a certificate and a copy of the picture. Whether Ross ever lived in the house on Arch Street is itself disputed. She did make flags for more than 50 years, among them some 50 garrison flags for the U.S. Arsenal in 1811.
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39.9523, -75.1446
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