The Liberty Bell, Colonial Front Doors, and the Real Story of Betsy Ross

Original Air Date: July 4, 2026 Episode Number: 466

Episode Summary

It's the annual Home In Progress Fourth of July Extravaganza. This year Dan covers three topics connected to the Revolutionary era: the Liberty Bell, and how almost everything most people think they know about it is a little off; colonial curb appeal, what colors those front doors actually were, and why any of that matters for your house today; and the real story of Betsy Ross -- not the polished legend, but the full picture of a feisty, independent tradeswoman who kept getting knocked down and kept getting back up. Better than the myth. More American, too.

In This Episode

• [00:00] -- Fourth of July Kickoff
• [00:34] -- Liberty Bell Origins
• [01:45] -- Revolution Myths Debunked
• [03:09] -- The Bell Was a Lemon
• [04:44] -- How It Got Its Name
• [05:41] -- Break
• [06:39] -- Colonial Curb Appeal
• [08:07] -- Real Colonial House Colors
• [10:02] -- Paint Forensics Explained
• [13:23] -- Classic Door Color Palette
• [16:55] -- Why Door Color Still Matters
• [18:38] -- Paint Project Payoff
• [19:23] -- Betsy Ross Legend Setup
• [19:59] -- 1776 Flag Shop Scene
• [23:59] -- Meet Elizabeth Griscom
• [24:38] -- Trade Skills and Elopement
• [29:16] -- Widowhood and Resilience
• [31:57] -- Washington Bed Hangings Proof
• [34:29] -- Did She Make the First Flag
• [35:51] -- Why the Myth Spread
• [37:34] -- Real Betsy Ross Legacy
• [39:31] -- Fourth of July Signoff

THE LIBERTY BELL Liberty Bell Origins [00:34]

Most people can picture the Liberty Bell -- big bronze bell, long jagged crack running up the side. Most people also have the story at least a little wrong.

The bell was not made for the Revolution. It was ordered in 1751, a full 25 years before the Declaration of Independence, for the Pennsylvania State House. The most likely occasion was the 50th anniversary of Pennsylvania's original constitution, a document called the Charter of Privileges, written by William Penn in 1701.

It happened to be in the Pennsylvania State House -- the building we now call Independence Hall -- when the Declaration of Independence was debated and adopted. It was there. So was dirt. Nobody's made a monument out of that either.

Revolution Myths Debunked [01:45]

There's a story that the Liberty Bell rang out to call people to the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence. Dan loves that story. Historians do not. No evidence supports it, and the general conclusion is that it was made up.

The Bell Was a Lemon [03:09]

The bell was ordered from a London foundry, shipped to Philadelphia, unpacked, and rung for the first time. On that first ring, it cracked. Two Philadelphia metalworkers -- John Pass and John Stow -- offered to fix it. They melted it down and cast a new one. That one didn't sound right. They melted it down again and cast another. The bell we know today is that second attempt. Three tries, two complete restarts.

How It Got Its Name [04:44]

For most of its existence, the bell was called the State House Bell or the Bell in the Steeple. The name Liberty Bell first appeared not during the Revolution but in abolitionist circles in the 1830s. People fighting to end slavery noticed a verse from Leviticus engraved on the bell: "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all inhabitants thereof." They claimed it as their symbol and renamed it the Liberty Bell. The name eventually stuck.

The Liberty Bell, in other words, is named for a fight that came decades after the Revolution ended.

COLONIAL FRONT DOORS Colonial Curb Appeal [06:39]

In late 1700s New England, a lot of homeowners put their money, skill, and creativity almost exclusively into the front of the house. The face you showed the road. That side got clapboard siding, embellishments around the windows and doors, and paint. The sides and the back were often covered in rougher shingles and left to weather -- going gray, brown, silver in the salt air, depending on the climate. Nobody who mattered was looking at the back of the house. That's where the family went. The important people came to the front.

Real Colonial House Colors [08:07]

Most people picture colonial houses as white. White is part of the story but not the whole story. In the late 1700s, a clapboard house might be white or off-white if the owner had money, but it might just as easily be red-brown, yellow ochre, gray, or tan -- or just left to weather, particularly on simpler rural homes.

The one place that almost always got paint, even when the rest of the house didn't, was the front door. It was the place to make a statement without the expense of painting an entire house. That was true 250 years ago and it's still true today.

Paint Forensics Explained [10:02]

How do we actually know what colors colonial houses were painted? The original paint is buried under 20 coats applied over two centuries, and old paintings of the buildings can't be trusted -- the artist may have taken liberties, and the pigments in the paintings fade over time.

The answer is cross-section microscopy. A conservator finds a protected spot where old paint survived -- behind a shutter hinge, under a piece of molding -- and takes a sample smaller than the head of a pin. That sample gets set in clear resin, polished down, and examined from the side under a microscope. Every coat of paint the building ever wore shows up as its own distinct layer. Count down to the very first one, identify the pigments, adjust for yellowing and fading, and you know the original color.

The man who pioneered this in America is Frank Welsh. He's read the paint on Independence Hall, the White House, and Grand Central Terminal, and saved over 50,000 samples in his career. In the 1980s and '90s, Colonial Williamsburg brought him in to study their historic buildings -- and what he found turned everything upside down.

For decades, people assumed colonial colors were soft, muted, grayed down. Turns out that look was just old, dirty, faded paint. The real colors were bolder, brighter, and more saturated than anyone believed. Williamsburg has gone back and repainted buildings to match what the science found. The colonists liked color a lot more than we gave them credit for.

Classic Door Color Palette [13:23]

If you were walking through a New England town in the late 1770s, these are the door colors you'd have likely seen:

Deep red-brown. Iron in the soil -- the same stuff that makes rust red -- produced a family of dull, brick-red earth colors. One common version was called Spanish brown. Dirt cheap, in the most literal sense of the phrase, and very common on doors and trim.

Deep green. A dark, earthy green was a popular choice for doors and shutters. The classic colonial green door has roots going back to this period, which is part of why it still reads as traditional today.

Black. More common as you move into the early 1800s. It looked formal, looked sharp, looked especially good against a pale house.

White and off-white. These came from white lead, which was expensive. A crisp white door was a quiet declaration that there was money in the house. What looks like an understated choice today was a statement then.

Prussian blue. A rich, deep, slightly greenish blue that arrived as a new pigment in the early 1700s and became a sensation. A blue door said you could afford something special.

Vermilion red. The most expensive of all. A brilliant, clean fire-engine red that came from a pigment worth nearly its weight in gold at certain points in history. A truly bright red door was the loudest possible way to tell the world you had money.

Why Door Color Still Matters [16:55]

When Dan pictures colonial America, he pictures parchment tones -- old paper, brown wood, gray stone, candlelight. Even the red, white, and blue of the flag feels muted in his mental image. But these people cared about color. They cared about curb appeal, they just didn't have the phrase for it. The front door was where homeowners made that statement without the expense of painting the whole house.

Two hundred and fifty years later, people still stand in front of the paint display and agonize over a quart of paint for the same reason. The front door speaks before anyone inside gets a chance to. That was true in 1775 and it's still true now.

Paint Project Payoff [18:38]

If you're looking for a summer weekend project, Dan's case is simple: look at your front door. What is it saying to the world? What is it saying to you? If the message needs to change, stop into any RepcoLite location and they'll help find the right color. It's a quart of paint and about four hours of work. The payoff is big.

THE REAL BETSY ROSS Betsy Ross Legend Setup [19:23]

Dan sets up the Betsy Ross segment by acknowledging that most people know some version of the legend. Before getting into whether it's true, he wants to introduce the real woman -- because she's considerably more interesting than the simplified version most of us grew up with.

1776 Flag Shop Scene [19:59]

Philadelphia, June 1776. A secret committee including George Washington walks into a small upholstery shop, pulls the blinds, and spreads a rough sketch on the table -- 13 stripes, 13 six-pointed stars. The seamstress, Betsy Ross, suggests switching to five-pointed stars, demonstrates with a single scissor snip, and agrees to make the flag.

Most people know some version of that scene. The question is whether any of it actually happened.

Meet Elizabeth Griscom [23:59]

Before answering that question, Dan introduces the real woman.

Elizabeth Griscom was born on New Year's Day, 1752, in Philadelphia -- the eighth of 17 children, raised Quaker. Unusually for the time, her father had her trained in a skilled trade rather than just married off. She was apprenticed to a Philadelphia upholsterer named William Webster.

Upholstery in the 1700s was the interior design business of its era -- one of the most prestigious and lucrative craft trades going. Upholsterers dressed the finest rooms, made the curtains, furniture, and bedding, imported high-end fabrics, and often worked in the client's home. Betsy Ross was not a humble seamstress. She was trained in the high-end decorating trade.

Trade Skills and Elopement [24:38]

At 21, Betsy fell in love with a fellow apprentice named John Ross -- the son of an Episcopal minister and completely unacceptable to the Quaker congregation. Betsy crossed the river to New Jersey anyway and married him at a tavern. She was expelled from the congregation and cut off from her family. The trade-off: she and John both knew the upholstery business, so they opened their own shop. At 21, she was in business for herself. That was uncommon for women in 1773.

Widowhood and Resilience [29:16]

John Ross died in 1775, two years in, leaving Betsy a widow at 24 running the shop alone. She remarried in 1777. Her second husband, Joseph Ashburn, was captured by the British and died in an English prison in 1782. The man who came to deliver that news was a fellow prisoner named John Claypoole. Eventually she married him too. That marriage lasted 34 years and produced five daughters.

Through all of it, Betsy kept the business running. Dan's favorite description of her: "a hard-nosed, snuff-loving businesswoman who was fond of storytelling. She wasn't this mild-mannered seamstress just waiting to do some domestic work."

Washington Bed Hangings Proof [31:57]

In 1774 -- two years before the supposed flag visit -- George Washington commissioned three sets of bed hangings for Mount Vernon from the Ross upholstery shop. Cotton chintz, purple floral prints, edged in green. He paid a down payment in gold coins. Mount Vernon curators confirmed it in 2014 from Washington's own cash records. A fully dressed bed was often the single most expensive piece of furniture in a home. This was high-end prestige work, documented, real, and pre-dating any flag story.

During the war, Betsy kept the shop going by taking whatever came in -- mending uniforms, sewing tents and blankets, rolling paper cartridges packed with musket balls for the Continental Army.

Did She Make the First Flag [34:29]

Betsy Ross made flags. That's documented. A Pennsylvania State Navy Board record from May 29, 1777 shows Elizabeth Ross was paid 14 pounds, 12 shillings, 2 pence for making ship's colors. From the early 1800s there are government contracts for US flags from her shop, including large garrison flags -- 18 by 24 feet, over 100,000 stitches each -- for US arsenals around 1810 to 1811. She made flags for more than 50 years.

But the specific legend -- the secret committee, the six-pointed stars, the single scissor snip -- didn't surface until 1870, thirty-four years after Betsy died. Her grandson William Canby presented the account to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, saying he'd heard it from an aunt in 1857. Historians have been through the diaries, the letters, and the records of the Continental Congress. Nothing. No flag committee. No 1776 meeting. No documentation from the time period at all. The conclusion: the first flag story is almost certainly invented.

Why the Myth Spread [35:51]

The story took hold largely because of timing. The 1876 centennial was approaching and would be held in Philadelphia. The country was hungry for Revolutionary War stories, especially ones that gave women a heroic role. Betsy was the right symbol at exactly the right moment. She was promoted as a patriotic role model for girls and the story spread quickly. It's still commonly accepted today.

Real Betsy Ross Legacy [37:34]

The legend turned a complicated woman into a sweet, quiet seamstress stitching stars by the window. That version is much smaller than the real person.

The real Betsy Ross got thrown out of her church for marrying the man she loved. She buried a husband at 24, then a second, then a third. Every time she got back up, kept her shop open, and kept her family going. She was a tradeswoman in the most respected craft of her day. She decorated George Washington's bedroom. When the country went to war, she became a defense contractor -- flags, uniforms, musket cartridges. She ran her own business for 50 years and handed it to her daughters, granddaughters, and nieces.

She didn't need the flag legend. She made herself matter with her own hands over a whole lifetime. Dan's closing point: that's the better Fourth of July story. A skilled, stubborn woman who got knocked down again and again and just kept going.

Find the Show

Home In Progress is on the air every weekend and available anytime at repcolite.com -- click the On the Radio tab on the homepage. Dan also posts episode content on Facebook and Instagram throughout the week.

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