Betsy Ross House: The Flag and the Woman

The narrow three-story row house at Two Thirty-Nine Arch Street is one of the most visited addresses in Philadelphia, and its central story remains one of the most disputed in American history. Built around seventeen forty, the house is where Betsy Ross is said to have lived and worked as an upholsterer and seamstress during the Revolutionary War, and family tradition holds that she was here when George Washington, Robert Morris, and George Ross came to commission the first American flag.

The flag story first entered public consciousness in eighteen seventy, nearly a century after the events it describes, when Betsy Ross's grandson William Canby presented an affidavit to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania based on family recollections. No contemporaneous written record corroborates the account, and historians continue to debate whether Ross actually sewed the first flag, or simply sewed flags early in the war like dozens of other craftspeople in Philadelphia.

What the documents do confirm is more substantial than legend. Ross was a skilled tradeswoman who ran her own business at a time when almost no women did. She produced tents, blankets, and paper cartridges for the Continental Army. She outlived three husbands, two of them killed during the war, and supported herself and her seven children entirely through her craft. She belonged to Christ Church, the same congregation that counted Washington and Franklin among its members.

Whether or not Ross sewed the first flag, her house preserves something true: the texture of working-class life in colonial Philadelphia, the small rooms, steep stairs, and modest furnishings of a woman who kept a household and a business running in the middle of a revolution. The house has been a museum since eighteen ninety-eight and receives roughly two hundred fifty thousand visitors a year, almost all of them coming for a story that may or may not be exactly right but points toward something that certainly is.