This was a bonus episode of Cool Weird Awesome for the people who make the show possible! It was exclusive to them until January 1, 2024.
Today in 1752, the birthday of the woman known today as Betsy Ross.
The legend goes that after meeting with General George Washington, Mrs. Ross put together the very first version of what would become the flag of the United States.
Historians are pretty sure that’s just a legend, but there are reasons why the story came to be.
In other words, the story wasn’t invented from… whole cloth.
She was born Elizabeth Griscom to a Quaker family, one of 17 children who spent most of their early years in Philadelphia.
Betsy became an apprentice to an upholsterer, John Webster, and eventually married another apprentice, John Ross.
Together they started their own upholstery business, although it’s said that John Ross was killed in early 1776 after he joined a local militia.
Betsy Ross would continue to run the business until age 76, when she retired and moved in with her daughter.
So where did the legend about the flag come from?
Ross’s grandson, William Canby, wrote a paper in 1870 that was based on family stories he’d heard.
They said that Betsy Ross’s relative, Colonel George Ross, called on her with General George Washington and Revolutionary financier Robert Morris to make a flag for the new country.
In that story, Betsy looks at the early design and improves it, chiefly by switching from six pointed stars to five pointed ones.
That story came out at a time after the Civil War where the American flag took on extra importance; a historian even referred to this phenomenon as the “cult of the flag.”
And so Betsy Ross became the lead character in the origin story, even if there’s not really any evidence of that meeting with Washington and Morris, or of the flag she supposedly made afterward.
So what can we say for sure?
Well, for one thing, Ross did make flags: there are receipts showing that she’d been hired to make “ship’s colours” during the Revolution, and she was hired by the government to make flags during the War of Independence and the War of 1812.
And it’s said she had also once been hired to make bed hangings for George Washington when he came to Philadelphia for the Continental Congress in 1774.
It wouldn’t surprise me if those stories got reworked over the decades into a family legend about the first American flag.
Especially since the other origin story has flag designer Francis Hopkinson asking to be paid for creating the American flag with a cask of wine… which he didn’t get.
But even if the legend isn’t true, Betsy Ross was a formidable woman, who really was right in the middle of the action in revolutionary Philadelphia.
There’s even a scholarly biography about her now, so you can learn all about her actual life.
On this day in 2021, a village in Austria changed its name.
The old name was the seven-letter version of the F word, with the -ing at the end.
Over time the villagers got tired of tourists taking photos of, and sometimes stealing, their signs.
The new name is Fugging, in case you were wondering.
Betsy Ross likely didn’t sew the first U.S. flag (National Geographic)
Betsy Ross (Museum of the American Revolution)
Austrian village of ‘Fucking’ decides to change its name (Deutsch Welle)
Image courtesy American Textile History Museum Collection via Creative Commons
