Old American Flag Photo Mystery: Best of Photo Detective

In addition to being a regular Family Tree Magazine column, Photo Detective was also a long-running blog hosted on our website by Maureen A. Taylor for several years. Here, we’ve combined some of her best posts from the past.

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 Photograph

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.

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Mystery Solved!

Our American flag photo mystery update! A big thank you to June Thomazin for sending me an article, “Mardi Gras Ball” from the Washington Times of February 11, 1917! The article lists the names of the women in the tableau imitating Henry Mosler’s painting, The Birth of the Flag. In the last article, I mentioned the seated woman’s light colored shoe as being from circa 1917. Seeing the date of the article made me smile.

According to the article, as the “Star Spangled Banner” played, the women re-enacted this scene for the third annual Mardi Gras ball of the Washington Camp, No. 305, Sons of Confederate Veterans. The four women were identified in the newspaper as Mrs. Andrew H. Plant, Mrs. Maud[e] Howell Smith, Mrs. George S. Covington and Mrs. Paul L. Joachim. But who were these women?

Who’s Who in the Photograph

Let’s start by putting the women in order by their ages in 1917, then comparing that information to the collage/picture:

• Elmina Joachim, 30
• Maud Howell Smith, 41
• Mary Elizabeth Plant, 54
• Janet Dorsey Covington, 55

(Only Maud Howell Smith used her own name, the rest went by their husband’s names, as was common. If you’ve ever researched female ancestors who did the same, then you know finding their first names can be a challenge.)

The two women on the left of the picture (and to the left in the collage) are the oldest so they are likely Janet Covington and Mary E. Plant.

The youngest woman (far right ) in both the collage and the picture must be Elmina Joachim.

The woman in the center could be Maud[e] Howell Smith.

First and Maiden Names Discovered

Hours (whew!) after searching GenealogyBank.com, FamilySearch.org and Ancestry.com (as well as Google), I was able to find a bit more about these women:

Mrs. George S. Covington (A) was the former Janet Dorsey (1862-1941).

Mrs. Andrew H. Plant (B) was a problem due to a misprint. In fact, her husband’s name was Alfred. (Double-check those newspaper articles before accepting the details as fact!) Their daughter Olive, crowned the queen of the carnival, solved that case. Mrs. Plant was the former Mary Elizabeth Bond (1863-1942), born in Connecticut.

Mrs. Paul Joachim (D) was the youngest of the four, born in Georgia in 1887. Her first name was Elmina.

Maude Howell Smith: A Remarkable Woman

Maud[e] Howell Smith (1876-1966) was a remarkable woman (C). She rejected using her husband Eli’s name at a time when husbands defined women’s lives. Her name frequently appeared in the society pages for Washington, D.C. In her later years, she acted in amateur theater. The Sunday Star (Washington, D.C.) of Jan. 4, 1953, interviewed her in an article, “Theater’s Grand Old Lady Has a New Role.”

She had wanted to pursue a professional career as an actress, but her parents objected. Instead, she supported local theater groups and later lived her dream of being on the stage in amateur productions. She drove an ambulance during World War I. She claimed in the article to have known every president since Benjamin Harrison. In 1953, she served on the Eisenhower Inaugural Committee.

Her advice in the interview is timeless: “It’s all very well to talk about what you’ve done in the past, but as a rule if you do too much of this, it means you aren’t doing enough today.”

Maud[e] Howell Smith as “Columbia,” 1919.

“It’s all very well to talk about what you’ve done in the past, but as a rule if you do too much of this, it means you aren’t doing enough today.” – Maude Howell Smith

We are thrilled to be able to present this American flag photo update! The intersection of history, family history and photography all came together in this picture. Lovely!