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Betsy Ross--Did she sew the first flag?

In June 1776, George Washington and a secret committee, assembled to create the first American flag, visited the Philadelphia upholstery business of Betsy Ross. The recently widowed seamstress was eager for any kind of work, but Ross wasn't thrilled with one detail of the original design. The flag featured a six-pointed star, a symbol she objected to because it was the commonly used star in English heraldry. America, she said, should use new imagery: a five-pointed star. To silence the men's protests that these new stars would be unfamiliar and difficult for seamstresses to make, she folded a piece of paper, made a single scissor snip, and revealed a perfect five-pointed star.

Makes for a classic story of American ingenuity, right? Maybe that's why some historians have been on a mission to debunk it. What they've found is that there is no congressional record of any secret flag committee, no official flag resolution until June of the following year, and no mention of Betsy Ross in George Washington's letters. But they also have found that no rival flag maker has proved to be as likely a candidate, and no other story accounts for the origins of the distinctive five-pointed stars on Old Glory. Until another tale accounts for that decisive detail, Ross's claim on the creation of the flag seems impossible to dismiss.

A naval seal. While concrete evidence to support Ross's case is lacking, circumstantial evidence abounds. She certainly made flags during the Revolutionary period (there is a receipt for her making "ship's colours" for the Pennsylvania Navy in May 1777), and she seems to be as likely a contender as any other flag maker living in Philadelphia at that time. Historians and vexillologists (flag experts) generally agree that Francis Hopkinson--Naval Board chairman and codesigner of the nation's Great Seal--likely designed the first flag. But no one has claimed that Hopkinson, who dabbled in both law and poetry, ever sewed a real flag.

And, if Hopkinson did design the flag, he almost definitely used heraldic estoiles, the ornate six-pointed stars that adorn the original Great Seal and his own coat of arms.
While he doesn't necessarily buy into the whole Ross legend, Peter Ansoff, president of the North American Vexillological Association, does theorize that the five-pointed-star design was influenced by someone who had to do the stitching.

"A flag maker probably saw those wavy [six] points and said, 'You're crazy!'" says Ansoff. "Flags could definitely be adjusted according to the whim of whomever was making it." Unlike the strictly standardized design of today's stars and stripes, Revolutionary-era flags lacked a unifying structure, especially in the organization of the stars. The Betsy Ross flag is best known by its circular star pattern, but the stars of other flags were often arranged in rows or arches or placed randomly on the blue field....
Read entire article at US News & World Report