Biggest & Best Flag That Ever Flew Book

Young Caroline Pickersgill lived with her mother and grandmother in Baltimore, Maryland. Mrs. Pickersgill, a widow, supported herself and her daughter by making flags for the ships that sailed into the city. Some soldiers from Fort McHenry came to her to order the biggest and best flag in the world, and Caroline helped to cut out the pieces and sew them.

When the British sailed up the Chesapeake Bay to destroy Baltimore during the War of 1812, the defenders at Fort McHenry beat them back. After the British sailed away the next morning, the flag gallantly streaming over the ramparts of the fort was the one Caroline and her mother had sewn. And "by the dawn's early light", Francis Scott Key saw it waving "o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave".

Recounts how Mrs. Pickergill of Baltimore was commissioned to make the huge flag which flew at Fort McHenry over Baltimore Harbor during a battle with the British in 1814.