The Flag Francis Scott Key Saw: From Fort McHenry to the Smithsonian

At 7:30 on the morning of September 14, 1814, the British fleet withdrew from Baltimore Harbor. The men inside Fort McHenry had held out through twenty-five hours of bombs and rockets. When the smoke cleared, the fort's defenders were still there, and a large garrison flag rose above the walls. 12

Francis Scott Key saw that flag from a truce ship anchored about eight miles down the river. The American lawyer had spent the night detained aboard the ship while British forces attacked the fort. Key wrote a poem about the sight on the back of a letter. The poem eventually became the national anthem, while the flag itself survived as a large, torn piece of wool and cotton. 1

The object in Washington is therefore two histories at once. The flag is a military textile made for distance and recognition. The flag is also a family relic, a souvenir source, a museum specimen, and the physical object behind a song that acquired new meanings over two centuries.

The measurements tell the first part of the story. The flag was not designed to be inspected at arm's length. The original 30-by-42-foot cloth was meant to fly from a ninety-foot flagpole and remain visible across Baltimore's harbor. The present 30-by-34-foot shape records the physical losses that followed its military service, family ownership, and long public life. 1

Major George Armistead arrived in Baltimore in June 1813 to command Fort McHenry. Armistead commissioned Mary Pickersgill to make two flags for the fort: a smaller storm flag measuring 17 by 25 feet and a larger garrison flag measuring 30 by 42 feet. The larger flag became the object now known as the Star-Spangled Banner. 1

Pickersgill worked with four teenage girls: her daughter, two nieces, and Grace Wisher, an African American indentured servant. The team pieced together dyed English wool bunting for the red and white stripes and blue field, then added white cotton stars. Each star measured about two feet across, and each stripe measured about twenty-four inches wide. 13

The commission followed the flag law of the young republic. The Flag Act of 1794 had added two stars and two stripes for Vermont and Kentucky, which brought the flag to fifteen of each. Congress returned the stripes to thirteen in 1818 while keeping one star for each state. The Star-Spangled Banner preserves the short period when the national design made the Union's expansion visible in both parts of the flag. 1

That design gives the textile an art-historical place of its own. The flag belongs to the material culture of the early republic. Its composition follows a legal standard, its materials follow military textile practice, and its scale turns color and geometry into a long-distance signal. The stars and stripes were decorative only in the most limited sense; the arrangement told viewers which nation and which Union the fort defended. 1

The making also complicates the familiar story of a single maker. Mary Pickersgill appears in the accession record because she held the commission, while the labor of her daughter, nieces, and Grace Wisher remains part of the object's creation history. A flag that later came to stand for a whole country began as paid work carried out by a small group of women and girls in Baltimore. 3

The War of 1812 had begun in June 1812 after disputes over American trade and the impressment of American sailors. Fort McHenry guarded the water entrance to Baltimore, then the young nation's third-largest city and an important port. After British troops captured and burned Washington in August 1814, Baltimore became the next major target. 12

About 5,000 British soldiers landed northeast of Baltimore in September 1814. American defenses stopped the land advance near the city, so the Royal Navy attacked Fort McHenry from the Patapsco River. Roughly 1,000 defenders endured the bombardment that began at 6:30 a.m. on September 13 and continued for twenty-five hours. 12

The weather changed which flag the soldiers could use. Heavy rain meant that the smaller storm flag flew during the bombardment. At dawn, after the British fleet began to withdraw, Major Armistead ordered the storm flag lowered and the great garrison flag raised. The defenders fired their guns and played "Yankee Doodle" as the flag appeared above the fort. 1

The object later became famous because the flag served its original purpose so clearly. The enormous cloth made the result of the battle visible to people who could not hear the guns or read a dispatch. From Key's ship, the flag was evidence that the fort had survived the night. The same textile then became the subject of a poem, which gave a military signal a voice. 1

Key had joined John S. Skinner, the U.S. government's agent for dealing with British forces in the Chesapeake, to secure the release of Dr. William Beanes, a civilian prisoner. British officers detained Key and Skinner aboard a truce ship because the two men might learn the British plan for attacking Baltimore. Key watched the bombardment from that enforced distance. 1

On September 14, Key began writing on the back of a letter. After returning to Baltimore on September 16, he revised the four-verse poem at the Indian Queen Hotel. The first printed broadside called the poem "The Defence of Fort McHenry" and instructed readers to sing it to the British melody "Anacreon in Heaven." A documented performance of the words and music together took place at Baltimore's Holliday Street Theatre on October 19, 1814. 1

The song's later history changed the flag's iconography. During the nineteenth century, the song became a widely loved patriotic piece. The U.S. military adopted it for ceremonies in the 1890s, and the Army and Navy used it as a ceremonial national anthem by 1917. Congress made the song the official national anthem on March 3, 1931. The object in the Smithsonian therefore carries a title that began as a description of one flag and became the name of a national song. 1

The relationship between object and anthem remains physical. The flag's fifteen stars belong to the constitutional history of the early United States, while the song's words were written during a particular battle. Later generations brought those layers together whenever the song was played or the flag was displayed. The museum's record describes that process as a continuing investment of personal meanings and memories in a national symbol. 3

The flag's ownership chain becomes unusually clear after the battle, then opens a small but important gap. George Armistead had acquired the flag by the time of his death in 1818, but the Smithsonian's account says that no documentary evidence shows how the flag came into his possession. The family preserved the flag as a memento of the defense of Baltimore. 1

When Armistead's widow died in 1861, she bequeathed the flag to their daughter, Georgiana Armistead Appleton. Georgiana allowed the flag to be exhibited publicly. Her son Eben Appleton inherited the flag in 1878 and began looking for a permanent institutional home as public curiosity grew. 1

The first known photograph of the flag was taken in 1873 at the Boston Navy Yard. The photograph already shows the central star missing. The absent star gives the public image a question that the surviving ownership record cannot answer: the family knew who had received the star, according to Georgiana's writings, but she did not disclose the recipient's name. The star's final location remains unknown. 5

The missing star was part of a larger nineteenth-century practice. The Armistead family gave away more than two hundred square feet of the flag in small pieces, usually to veterans, public officials, and other honored recipients. The Smithsonian now holds thirteen Star-Spangled Banner fragments, but conservators cannot identify the locations from which the pieces were cut, so the fragments cannot be sewn back into the main flag. 1

Eben Appleton first lent the flag to the Smithsonian Institution in 1907. Appleton converted the loan into a permanent gift in 1912, and the museum's credit line still names him as the donor. The transfer moved the flag from a family archive into public custody while preserving the family name inside the accession record. 13

The photograph makes the flag's condition difficult to separate from its meaning. The dark blue canton has lost areas of cloth, the stars have browned, and the red and white stripes have faded into a range of muted tones. The large central absence is especially legible because the surrounding fabric still preserves the shape of the star field. The object reads as a flag because the design survives, and as a historical witness because the surface does too. 3

The surviving surface also shows that the flag remained a working military object after the battle. Mary Pickersgill and her seamstresses repaired the flag several times before the Armistead family retired it. The patches and mends record ordinary maintenance before the cloth acquired the protected status of a national relic. 5

The object belongs to a period when flags were made to move in wind, endure weather, and communicate across a battlefield. The textile's art-historical significance lies in the way legal design, large-scale sewing, color, and public memory meet in one surviving surface. The Smithsonian's image preserves the object as a material artifact and keeps the damage visible.

The Smithsonian received a fragile flag in 1907. In 1914, the museum hired Amelia Fowler, a flag restorer and embroidery teacher, to attach the flag to a linen backing. Fowler worked with ten needlewomen, who made approximately 1.7 million interlocking stitches over eight weeks. The backing was meant to strengthen the textile, and the treatment also made the flag look more like a continuous tapestry, making original and added material difficult for visitors to distinguish. 15

The flag hung in a glass case in the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building for nearly fifty years. The flag spent two years in a government warehouse in Virginia during World War II, when museum officials wanted to protect the national collection from possible bombing raids. The flag moved to the new National Museum of History and Technology, now the National Museum of American History, in 1964. 15

By the 1990s, years of hanging, light, dust, and unstable environmental conditions had placed additional stress on the fibers. The Smithsonian launched a new conservation project in 1998. Conservators removed Fowler's stitching and linen backing, examined the colors and fibers, measured stains, holes, and mends, and lifted surface dirt with dry cosmetic sponges. After further analysis, the team used an acetone-and-water solution to remove harmful contaminants. 15

The treatment ended with support rather than visual reconstruction. Conservators attached a lightweight polyester fabric called Stabiltex to one side of the flag, then installed the textile in a climate-controlled, low-light chamber. The permanent exhibition opened on November 21, 2008. The current gallery displays the flag at a shallow angle behind a 35-foot glass wall, allowing visitors to see the surviving cloth while reducing the strain of hanging it vertically. 14

The conservation history changes the meaning of the word "original." The flag in the gallery is original in its surviving fibers, colors, stitches, repairs, holes, and losses. The flag also carries layers of twentieth-century intervention, some of which have been removed and documented. The Smithsonian set the conservation goal as preventing further deterioration; the project left the object visibly old. 1

The documented chain begins with a Baltimore commission in 1813 and a flag made from wool, cotton, labor, and a law that temporarily required fifteen stars and fifteen stripes. The chain then passes through Fort McHenry, a night of bombardment, a family collection, a missing star, a 1907 loan, a 1912 gift, a century of conservation, and the current exhibition at the National Museum of American History. 134

Several links in that chain remain open. The Smithsonian record does not document how George Armistead acquired the flag before 1818. The Smithsonian cannot identify the recipient of the missing central star. The original storm flag commissioned alongside the garrison flag has not been located. These gaps belong in the provenance because the record is part of the artifact's history. 15

The flag's afterlife is unusually concrete. The family cut pieces from it, the missing star created a permanent absence, Francis Scott Key used the sight of it as the starting point for a poem, and the Smithsonian rebuilt the conditions under which visitors can examine its wounds. The national symbol grew from a textile that still shows every stage of becoming one.

For further exploration, the Smithsonian's related records include thirteen Star-Spangled Banner fragments, a portrait of Francis Scott Key, and the National Park Service's history of Fort McHenry. Each link returns to a different part of the same chain: the pieces that were cut away, the observer who supplied the words, and the fort that supplied the scene.