The Betsy Ross flag is the one everybody can picture and almost nobody can date. It is having a moment in 2026, because the country is 250 years old this year and founding era flags are back on porches that have never flown one. So, the flag, the history, and the honest state of the story attached to it.
What the Betsy Ross Flag Is
The Betsy Ross flag is an early United States flag with thirteen red and white stripes and thirteen white five pointed stars arranged in a circle on a blue canton. The thirteen of each stand for the thirteen original colonies, and the circle was meant to show them as equals with no colony placed above another.
That circular arrangement is the whole design. Congress's Flag Resolution of June 14, 1777 called for thirteen stripes alternating red and white and a union of thirteen white stars on blue, and it said nothing at all about how the stars should be laid out. Flag makers of the period arranged them in rows, in circles, in a square and in scattered patterns, and all of them were legal. The circle is one solution among several that happens to be the one that stuck in the national memory.
Modern law is more prescriptive about the stripes than the stars. Title 4 of the United States Code still fixes the flag at thirteen horizontal stripes with a union of stars, and the star count itself moves by executive order as states join, which is why the statute and the flag on your pole do not match on that one number.
Did Betsy Ross Actually Make It
The truthful answer is that nobody knows, and the sources you will hit next are candid about it, so we will be too.
The story reached the public in 1870, when William Canby read a paper to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania describing what his grandmother Betsy Ross had told the family. Canby was her grandson, the account came almost a century after the events it describes, and it is supported by sworn family affidavits rather than by any contemporary document. No 1776 minute, letter or receipt names her as the maker of the first flag.
What is not in doubt is that Betsy Ross was a real Philadelphia upholsterer who made flags, that upholsterers of that period did exactly this kind of sewing work, and that she was connected to the men the story names. Historians treat the specific first flag claim as unproven and the general picture as entirely plausible. If you fly this flag, you are flying a genuine early American design with a family story attached that has never been confirmed or disproven, and that is a more interesting thing to own than a certainty.
The Other Claimant, and the Other Arrangements
If the attribution is unsettled, it is worth knowing who else is in the frame, because this is the part the story usually leaves out.
Francis Hopkinson, a New Jersey signer of the Declaration of Independence and a designer of seals and currency, wrote to Congress asking to be paid for designing the flag. Congress declined, on the grounds that he was not the only person who had contributed and that he was already a public servant. That correspondence exists, which is more contemporary documentary support than the Ross account has, and it is why historians treat Hopkinson seriously.
It does not settle anything either. A design credit and a first sewing are different claims, and both can be partly true at once. What the record supports is that the thirteen star flag emerged from more than one hand in Philadelphia in the late 1770s, and that the tidy single origin story is a nineteenth century simplification of a messier event.
The star arrangements of the period were just as unsettled. The 1777 resolution specified thirteen stars in a blue union and said nothing about layout, so flag makers used what suited them. Rows of three, two, three, two and three. A square. A circle. A circle with one star in the center. The Cowpens flag, sometimes called the third Maryland, is a thirteen star circle with a star in the middle, and it is a different flag from the Betsy Ross even though a photograph at a distance will not tell you so.
That variety is the honest historical picture, and it is a better story than uniformity. Our wider historic flag range covers several of these designs, and confusing them with each other is the most common mistake we hear on the phone.
What It Is Not, and This Trips People Up
Two flags get mistaken for this one often enough to be worth naming.
The Grand Union flag, flown at the start of 1776, carries the same thirteen stripes but has the British Union in the canton rather than stars. It is the flag that preceded the star spangled design, and it looks startlingly like a British ensign for exactly that reason.
The Bennington flag, with its large numeral 76 and an arch of stars, is a different design entirely and its dating is contested in its own right. It is not an early Betsy Ross with decoration added.
Getting these apart matters if you are buying one, because a reproduction sold under a loose label is not necessarily the flag you had in mind.
Why the Circle Is Harder to Make Than a Fifty Star Field
This is the part we can speak to that a museum cannot. A modern fifty star field is a grid. Rows and columns, fixed spacing, and the same jig every time, which is why we can make more than 5 million U.S. flags a year at consistent quality in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.
A ring of thirteen is not a grid. Every star sits on a circle at a different angle, so there is no shared reference edge to work from, and the eye is unforgiving about a circle in a way it is not about a grid. One star set two degrees off reads as a wobble across the whole canton. Spacing has to be equal around the arc rather than equal along a line, and the canton is small, so the tolerances are tighter than on a modern flag even though there are far fewer stars.
Everything else about the flag is ordinary manufacturing. It is the canton that makes it a specialty item, and it is why historic reproductions sit in a different part of our line from the standard national flags.
Flying a Betsy Ross Flag Today
Under the Flag Code, an early United States flag remains a flag of the United States and may be flown. The convention when you fly a historic flag alongside the current national flag is that the current fifty star flag takes the position of honor, at the peak of the pole or on the marching right, and the historic design goes below or alongside it. The historic flag is not a substitute for the current one.
Most people fly this design for an anniversary rather than year round, and 2026 is the anniversary. We keep Betsy Ross flags in four nylon sizes, from 2 by 3 up to 5 by 8, which covers a porch bracket at the small end and a residential pole at the large end.
The wider historic flag range covers the other founding era and early republic designs for anyone building a set rather than buying one flag. If you want the odd one out of that group, the 27 star flag is the 1845 flag that flew for a single year before Texas changed the count again.
For the semiquincentennial specifically, our America 250 flags are the current year's designs rather than historic reproductions. And if you want the company end of the story rather than the country's, we have written about how we keep that heritage flying.
FAQ
What does a Betsy Ross flag symbolize?
It represents the thirteen original colonies at the moment they became states. The thirteen stripes and thirteen stars are the count, and the circular arrangement of the stars was understood to show the colonies as equal to one another, with none in a superior position. It is a flag of the founding rather than of any later period.
Is it okay to fly a Betsy Ross flag?
Yes. It is a former flag of the United States, it remains a legitimate American flag, and the Flag Code does not prohibit flying historic designs. The one convention to observe is that when it is flown with the current fifty star flag, the current flag holds the position of honor.
What does it mean to hang a Betsy Ross flag?
Most households fly it to mark a founding era anniversary, a historic site or a period commemoration, which is why 2026 has brought so many of them out. Displayed flat against a wall it follows the same rule as any United States flag, with the blue union uppermost and to the observer's left.
