American Flag Mystery: Old Glory in an Old Photo

The Photograph

In the collections of the Library of Congress is this beautiful photograph of a tableau of four women sewing an American flag. (They aren’t really—it’s just a pose.) This image, called Birth of the American Flag, was taken by Harris & Ewing in an unknown year. They were well-known newspaper photographers. The Library of Congress has all but 400 of the 50,000 (!) images they took. The cataloging page lists a broad “created/published” time frame for this image of anywhere between 1905 and 1945. It’s hard to know exactly when these women posed for this American flag photo if they used an older flag. Determining a tentative date comes down to the details—a shoe, beading and of course the stars on the flag.

The Inspiration

It was a sharp eyed reader, Teresa Shippey, who found the source of this tableau. While I searched newspapers in a literal way using the search term, “Birth of the American Flag,” I didn’t find what I was looking for. I also did a Google Images search using the exact picture. No luck. Then again, not all images online are indexed in Google Images. Turns out I was being too specific in my searching. Teresa revealed she used the general phrase, “women sewing flag” in Google. She discovered the women based their pose on a painting by Henry Mosler titled, The Birth of the Flag.

The Stars

If you own a flag, count the stars to obtain a time frame for it. You can learn more about the history of our flag courtesy of this PBS documentary. A quick reference guide to when stars were added to our flag due to the addition of states is on USFlag.org. I’ve counted and double counted the stars in this picture, and I think it’s a 48-star flag. How many do you count?

If that’s the case, and the women are posing with a contemporary flag, then this image could date anywhere between July 4, 1912, and Jan. 3, 1959. That gives us a starting place.

The Shoe

The woman kneeling to the left of the flag has exposed her shoe. It’s a calfskin shoe with a criss-cross upper and a Louis heel. Women wore shoes of this design with this heel from about 1908 to the 1930s, but I’ve found similar-style shoes dating from circa 1917 in Shoes: The Complete Sourcebook by John Peacock.

The Beaded Dress

While all the other women wear Colonial-style costume, the woman with the calfskin shoe wears a beaded dress with a wide collar. It’s not a colonial design, it’s from the 20th century. with diaphanous sleeves and lots of beading also could date from the WWI period. The collar is an interesting addition to this style of dress.

The Pose

Why are they posed exactly the same way as the painting? I wondered (and I do too) if the women in this American flag photo were models for Mosler’s painting. Another possibility is that they were recreating the painting. Posing as famous paintings and sculptures was a pastime before radio and television, so it’s also possible that’s what they are doing.The problem with the modeling theory is that the women in the photo seemed to have posed with a 48 star flag, not the 46 star flag used in 1911. It’s hard to tell exactly the number of stars in the picture because part of the star field is folded over. There’s one more interesting feature of this photo: all the women posed with their eyes closed.