When Collectors Cut Off Pieces of the Star-Spangled Banner As Keepsakes

Stephen Salisbury II, one of the wealthiest men in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the 1800s, had interests in banking, canals and railroads. But his collection of fragments from the Star-Spangled Banner—one red swatch, one white—made him feel less like a have than a have-not. A friend possessed a blue scrap, and, without one for himself, Salisbury feared his pair lacked the appropriate “sentiment and force.”

“I therefore cannot refrain from the freedom of asking you to send me a piece of blue,” he wrote in 1874 to Georgiana Armistead Appleton, the daughter of Lt. Col. George Armistead, the celebrated commander of Fort McHenry during the British bombardment that began on September 13, 1814. Appleton had inherited the garrison flag after her parents’ death and was soon up to her bonnet in similar appeals.

“Had we given all that we had been importuned for little would be left to show,” Appleton had groused the year before. Still, Salisbury got his “snipping”—as did countless other dignitaries, historical groups, family friends, even household staff.

Which helps explain why the flag on permanent exhibit at the National Museum of American History, however colossal, is 240 square feet smaller—or nearly 20 percent—than it was on that fateful day in Baltimore two centuries ago. A piece was buried with a veteran of the battle at the behest of his widow; another rests in the Francis Scott Key Monument in Golden Gate Park. One of the giant stars was “cut out for some official person,” Appleton wrote, though she took the recipient’s identity to her grave.