Betsy Ross - Flag, Education & Death

Who Was Betsy Ross?

Betsy Ross apprenticed with an upholsterer before irrevocably splitting with her family to marry outside the Quaker religion. She and her husband John Ross started their own upholstery business. Despite a lack of credible evidence to support it, legend holds that President George Washington requested that Ross make the first American flag.

Early Life

Ross, best known for making the first American flag, was born Elizabeth Griscom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 1, 1752. A fourth-generation American, and the great-granddaughter of a carpenter who had arrived in New Jersey in 1680 from England, Ross was the eighth of 17 children. Like her sisters, she attended Quaker schools and learned sewing and other crafts common in her day.

After Ross completed her schooling, her father apprenticed her to a local upholsterer, where, at age 17, she met John Ross, an Anglican. The two young apprentices quickly fell for one another, but Ross was a Quaker, and the act of marrying outside of one's religion was strictly off-limits. To the shock of their families, Ross and John married in 1772, and she was promptly expelled from both her family and the Friends meeting house in Philadelphia that served as a place of worship for Quakers. Eventually, the couple opened their own upholstery business, drawing on Ross' deft needlework skills.