Flag House & Star-Spangled Banner Museum, Federal architecture museum in Baltimore, United States.
The Flag House & Star-Spangled Banner Museum is a historic Federal-style townhouse in Baltimore, Maryland, preserved as a house museum. It includes exhibit galleries, an orientation theater, and a gift shop, all centered on the story of a flag sewn here in the early 19th century.
The house was built around 1793 and gained its place in history when Mary Pickersgill sewed a large garrison flag here in 1813, commissioned for Fort McHenry. That flag survived a British naval bombardment and went on to inspire the poem that became the national anthem.
The house shows how a woman ran a trade from home in the early 1800s, which was unusual for the time. The rooms are furnished to reflect the daily routine of a working household where sewing was both a craft and a source of income.
The museum is in downtown Baltimore and easy to reach on foot from nearby streets and landmarks. The building has multiple floors, so visitors should be ready for stairs and plan enough time to go through all the galleries.
The flag was so large that Mary Pickersgill had to finish sewing it on the floor of a nearby brewery because it did not fit inside the house. A window in the museum shows the exact dimensions of the original flag, making the scale of the work easier to grasp.
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