Today's Article - Betsy Ross

This article is for quizzes on Monday June 29th, 2015...

Betsy Ross (January 1, 1752 – January 30, 1836), born Elizabeth Phoebe Griscom, also later known by her second and third married names: Elizabeth Ashburn and Elizabeth Claypoole, is widely credited with making the first American flag purportedly in 1776, according to family tradition, upon a visit from General George Washington, commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, and changing the shape of the stars described on the flag from six-pointed to easier-to-produce five-pointed stars.
However, there is no archival evidence or other verbal traditions that this story or "legend" of the first American flag is true and supposedly the story first surfaced in the early 1870s by the description of her descendants—a grandson—a century later, with no mention being made or documented anywhere in earlier decades.

Research conducted by the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. notes that the story of Betsy Ross making the first American flag for General George Washington entered into American consciousness about the time of the 1876 Centennial celebrations, with the Centennial Exposition then scheduled to be held in Philadelphia. In 1870, Ross's grandson, William J. Canby, presented a research paper to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in which he claimed that his grandmother had "made with her hands the first flag" of the United States. Mr. Canby said he first obtained this information from his aunt Clarissa Sydney (Claypoole) Wilson in 1857, twenty years after Betsy Ross's death. Canby dates the historic episode based on General Washington's journey to Philadelphia, in the late spring of 1776, a year before the Second Continental Congress passed the first Flag Act of June 14, 1777.

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