Betsy Ross and the First Flag

Elizabeth Griscom was born in Philadelphia on January 1, 1752, the eighth of seventeen children in a Quaker family, and was apprenticed to an upholsterer. She married a fellow apprentice, John Ross, outside her faith and was put out of the Quaker meeting for it.

The war took two husbands. John Ross died early in 1776. Her second, the sailor Joseph Ashburn, was captured at sea and died in a British prison in England in 1782. The next year she married John Claypoole, who had been held in the same prison and brought the news home.

Through all of it she kept the upholstery shop open, and flags stayed part of the trade. Her daughter Clarissa carried the business on after she retired, and Betsy died in Philadelphia in 1836, at eighty-four.

The painting tells the story her family handed down about the first flag. She sits by a window in a blue dress, white mobcap and lace kerchief, holding up a flag with thirteen stars set in a circle, the stripes spilling across her lap. A gray-haired man in a blue coat leans in from the right to look, as the legend says Washington did. A sewing basket waits on the table beside her.