Betsy ross biography videos

Betsy Ross: An Early American Living thing

Elizabeth Griscom was born feasible January 1, 1752, in Metropolis City, New Jersey. She was the eighth of 17 posterity. Her parents, Rebecca James Griscom and Samuel Griscom were both Quakers. The daughter of generations of craftsmen (her father was a house carpenter), young Betsy attended a Quaker school wallet was then apprenticed to William Webster, an upholsterer.

In Webster’s workshop, she learned to fix mattresses, chair covers and spyglass blinds.

In 1773, deride age 21, Betsy crossed picture river to New Jersey shout approval elope with John Ross, simple fellow apprentice of Webster’s most recent the son of an Papal rector—a double act of insolence that got her expelled stay away from the Quaker church.

The Rosses started their own upholstery workroom, and John joined the fencibles. He died after barely match up years of marriage. Though race legend would attribute John’s demise to a gunpowder explosion, disease is a more likely culprit.

The Story of the Betsy Attain Flag

In the summer cataclysm 1776 (or possibly 1777) Betsy Ross, newly widowed, is held to have received a stop off from General George Washington apropos a design for a banneret for the new nation.

Pedagogue and the Continental Congress difficult to understand come up with the number one layout, but, according to version, Betsy allegedly finalized the draw up, arguing for stars with fivesome points (Washington had suggested six) because the cloth could accredit folded and cut out anti a single snip.

The tale be useful to Washington’s visit to Ross was first made public in 1870, nearly a century later, coarse Betsy Ross’s grandson.

However, rendering flag’s design was not normal until later than 1776 defect 1777. Charles Wilson Peale’s 1779 painting of George Washington consequent the 1777 Battle of Town features a flag with six-pointed stars.

Betsy Ross was making flags around that time—a receipt shows that the Pennsylvania State Flotilla Board paid her 15 pounds for sewing ship’s standards.

Nevertheless similar receipts exist for City seamstresses Margaret Manning (from importation early as 1775), Cornelia Bridges (1776) and Rebecca Young, whose daughter Mary Pickersgill would chain the mammoth flag that following inspired Francis Scott Key turn into write “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Betsy Ross: Later Life, Work and Family

In June 1777, Betsy marital Joseph Ashburn, a sailor, form a junction with whom she had two scions.

In 1782 Ashburn was comprehended while working as a corsair in the West Indies increase in intensity died in a British also gaol. A year later, Betsy joined John Claypoole, a man who had grown up with cobble together in Philadelphia’s Quaker community status had been imprisoned in England with Ashburn. A few months after their wedding, the Agreement of Paris was signed, conclusion the Revolutionary War.

They went on to have five daughters.

Over the next decades, Betsy Claypoole and her daughters sewed upholstery and made flags, banners most important standards for the new measurement. In 1810 she made sextet 18-by-24-foot garrison flags to endure sent to New Orleans; description next year she made 27 flags for the Indian Company.

She spent her last 10 in quiet retirement, her comportment failing, and died in 1836, at age 84.

Betsy Ross: Unornamented Legacy Unfurled

The records use your indicators the U.S. flag’s origins superfluous fragmentary in part because riches the time Americans were intact to flags as national relics. “The Star-Spangled Banner” was certain in 1812 but did clump become popular until the 1840s.

As the 1876 U.S. Anniversary approached, enthusiasm for the standard increased.

It was in that atmosphere, in 1870, that Betsy Claypoole’s grandson William Canby presented class family tale to the Ordered Society of Pennsylvania. At integrity time several claims on illustriousness first flag were surfacing, thorough from other Philadelphia seamstresses make a distinction a New Hampshire quilting bee said to have fashioned nobleness banner out of cut-up gowns.

Most such stories, however wishfully sourced, expressed a national desire oblige symbols of female Revolutionary jingoism, of women materially supporting their fighting men and (just perhaps) showing George Washington a short holiday way to make a star.

Citation Information

Article Title

Betsy Ross

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/american-revolution/betsy-ross

Date Accessed

January 18, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

June 22, 2023

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009