Mary Pickersgill | Star-Spangled Seamstress

This episode of Ballot and Beyond, contributed by the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center, was written by Amanda Shores Davis, Executive Director of the Star-Spangled Banner House.  The reader is Kate Campbell Stevenson, member of the Maryland Women’s Heritage Center Board of Directors and Maryland Women’s Heritage Center Board Cultural Ambassador. 

A resident of Baltimore for more than fifty years, Mary Young Pickersgill was a successful businesswoman and an outspoken advocate for the working women of the city.  Mary Pickersgill’s greatest contribution to Maryland and to the entire United States was as a flag maker during the War of 1812.  The Star-Spangled Banner made by Mrs. Pickersgill became the inspiration for Francis Scott Key to write the poem that became the national anthem of the United States in 1931.  Today that flag resides in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.

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