Betsy Ross

Elizabeth Griscom was born in Philadelphia on January 1, 1752, the eighth of seventeen children of Samuel Griscom, a house carpenter, and Rebecca James Griscom ^[1]. The family belonged to the Society of Friends, and Betsy grew up inside the plain discipline of Quaker Philadelphia: modest dress, careful speech, and steady work. Her great grandfather Andrew Griscom had arrived from England in the 1680s, part of the first generation of Quaker settlers who built the city, and the family maintained a respectable position among its artisan class ^[2].

She attended a Quaker school, where children learned reading, writing, and a trade appropriate to their station. Needlework came naturally to her, and as a teenager she was apprenticed to William Webster, an established Philadelphia upholsterer ^[1]. Eighteenth century upholstery covered far more than furniture. Webster's shop produced bed hangings, curtains, mattresses, umbrellas, and flags, and an apprentice absorbed the whole range of the trade. This training, unusual in its rigor for a young woman, gave Betsy the skills on which she would depend for the rest of her long life ^[3].

In Webster's shop Betsy worked alongside a fellow apprentice named John Ross, the son of an assistant rector at Christ Church, Philadelphia's Anglican parish. The two fell in love, but marriage outside the Society of Friends carried a heavy price. Quaker meetings disowned members who married out, cutting them off from the community that had shaped their entire upbringing ^[2].

Betsy chose John anyway. In November 1773, at the age of twenty one, she crossed the Delaware River with him to Hugg's Tavern in Gloucester, New Jersey, where they were married without her parents' consent ^[1]. The Quaker meeting formally disowned her, and she began worshipping at Christ Church, where members of the city's Revolutionary leadership, including George Washington when he was in Philadelphia, also attended services ^[4].

The young couple opened their own upholstery business. Their timing was hard: the trade depended on imported fabrics just as the colonial boycotts of British goods took hold, and war soon disrupted commerce altogether. John Ross joined the Pennsylvania militia and died in January 1776. Family tradition attributed his death to a gunpowder explosion while he guarded munitions along the Delaware, though the exact cause is not documented ^[3]. At twenty four, Betsy Ross was a widow running a shop alone in a city sliding into war.

The episode that made Betsy Ross a household name was not published until nearly a century after it supposedly happened. In March 1870 her grandson, William J. Canby, read a paper to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania claiming that in the late spring of 1776 three men called at her shop: George Washington, the financier Robert Morris, and George Ross, a Pennsylvania delegate to the Continental Congress and her late husband's uncle ^[5]. According to Canby, they showed her a sketch for a national flag, and she suggested changing its six pointed stars to five pointed ones, demonstrating that a five pointed star could be cut with a single scissor snip from folded cloth. She then sewed the flag in her back parlor.

Canby's account rested on stories his grandmother told her children and grandchildren, and on affidavits from her daughter, niece, and granddaughter ^[5]. No contemporary record from 1776 or 1777 confirms the meeting, and Congress did not adopt the Stars and Stripes until the Flag Resolution of June 14, 1777 ^[4]. Most historians therefore treat the story as family tradition rather than established fact. The historian Marla Miller, author of the fullest modern Betsy Ross biography, concludes that Ross was one of several Philadelphia craftspeople who made early American flags, though no evidence singles her out as maker of the first ^[3].

What the records do show is telling enough. In May 1777 the Pennsylvania State Navy Board paid Elizabeth Ross a little over fourteen pounds for making ships' colours, proof that she was a working flag maker during the Revolution ^[4]. For anyone asking who was Betsy Ross beyond the legend, the answer begins there: a documented artisan supplying the American war effort with her needle.

The Revolution kept testing her. In June 1777 she married Joseph Ashburn, a mariner who ran cargoes past the British blockade. That autumn British forces occupied Philadelphia, and soldiers were quartered in the city's houses, a burden Ross family tradition says she shared ^[1]. Her first daughter with Ashburn, Zilla, died in infancy; a second daughter, Eliza, was born in 1781.

Ashburn's luck ran out that same year. The British captured his ship, and he was imprisoned at Old Mill Prison in Plymouth, England, where he died in March 1782, months before peace ^[2]. Betsy learned of his death from a fellow prisoner, John Claypoole, an old Philadelphia acquaintance who had been released and carried Ashburn's farewell home to her.

In May 1783 she married Claypoole, her third and final husband. Both rejoined organized religion through the Society of Free Quakers, a small congregation formed by Friends who had been disowned for supporting the Revolution ^[4]. The marriage lasted thirty four years and produced five daughters, four of whom survived to adulthood. When Claypoole's health failed after years of illness, the upholstery shop remained the family's anchor, with Betsy at its head ^[3].

Among the clearest Betsy Ross facts is the sheer length of her working life. She kept the upholstery and flag making business going for over fifty years, training daughters and nieces in the trade and filling government orders long after the Revolution ended. Records show her firm supplying garrison flags for federal arsenals in the early nineteenth century, including work connected to the Indian Department and the United States Arsenal on the Schuylkill ^[3].

John Claypoole died in 1817 after a long decline. Betsy continued working into her seventies, finally retiring around 1827 and turning the business over to family members ^[1]. She spent her last years living with her daughters, first on a farm outside the city and then back in Philadelphia. Her eyesight failed toward the end of her life, but relatives recalled her repeating the flag story to grandchildren well into old age ^[5].

She died in Philadelphia on January 30, 1836, at the age of eighty four. Her remains were moved twice, and in 1975 they were reinterred in the courtyard beside the Betsy Ross House on Arch Street, the small rented dwelling where tradition places her flag work ^[4].

The legend took on a life of its own after 1870. Canby's paper appeared just as the United States approached its centennial, a moment hungry for founding stories, and the image of a young widow sewing the first flag for General Washington proved irresistible ^[5]. Charles Weisgerber's 1893 painting Birth of Our Nation's Flag, exhibited at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, fixed the scene in the popular imagination, and a national fundraising campaign preserved the Arch Street house as a shrine. The Betsy Ross House now draws visitors from around the world as part of Philadelphia's historic district ^[6].

Any honest Betsy Ross biography has to hold two things at once. The first flag story cannot be verified, and scholars have noted that other claimants, such as Francis Hopkinson, who billed Congress for designing the flag, have stronger paper trails for the design itself ^[4]. Yet the documented Betsy Ross achievements need no embellishment: a skilled tradeswoman who survived three widowhoods, raised her daughters on her own earnings, and made flags for Pennsylvania and later the federal government across half a century ^[3].

Historians now often read her story as a lesson in how national memory works, and in whose labor gets remembered. Marla Miller argues that Ross matters precisely because she was ordinary, one of thousands of artisans whose hands built the material world of the Revolution ^[3]. The legend put a woman at the founding table; the record shows why she deserved a place there.