Before You Hold It, Know Its Story
On September 12, 2026, thousands of Utah County residents will stretch an epic chain of American flags along the Murdock Canal and Provo River Trails, forming an epic display in honor of America’s 250th Anniversary and the freedoms we hold dear.
Before you take your place in the historic chain, we invite you to take a few minutes to learn the story behind the flag you’re holding.
June 14, 1777
The Continental Congress passes the Flag Act, creating the first official U.S. flag: 13 stars, 13 strips.
1795
Stars and stripes both grow to 15 with the addition of Vermont and Kentucky. This is the flag flown at Fort McHenry.
1818
Congress locks the stripes at 13 forever and decides only the stars will grow with each new state.
1960
The 50th star is added for Hawaii on July 4th —the flag we still fly today, the longest-serving design in American history.
The story most of us know is simple: George Washington asks Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross to sew the first American flag, and she even suggests the five-pointed star. It’s a great story — historians just aren’t sure it’s true. Many now credit New Jersey congressman Francis Hopkinson as the likely designer. Either way, nobody at the time knew what they were making.
What we do know: on June 14, 1777, Congress passed the Flag Act, creating the first official flag — thirteen stars and thirteen stripes, one for each original colony. That date is still celebrated as Flag Day.
The flag didn’t stop at thirteen. When Vermont and Kentucky joined the Union, Congress added two stars and two stripes. This fifteen-star, fifteen-stripe flag is the one that flew over Fort McHenry in 1814 — the one Francis Scott Key watched through the smoke, and the one that inspired our national anthem.
By 1818, it was clear that adding a stripe for every new state wouldn’t work forever. So Congress made a defining choice: lock the stripes at thirteen, honoring the original colonies, and let only the stars grow — one new star per state, added every July 4th.
The stripes became an anchor to where the nation came from. The stars became the story of where it was going — twenty, then thirty, thirty-six after the Civil War, forty-eight through two World Wars, and finally fifty in 1960 with the addition of Hawaii’s star. That flag has flown unchanged longer than any version before it.
Twenty-seven different flags. One unbroken idea.
On September 12th, thousands of Utah County residents will hold that flag end to end along the Murdock Canal and Provo River Trails — proof that, like the flag itself, this is still a story being written by people who Stand for Freedom.
The Flag That Grew With a Nation
More Than a Song
We’ve heard it hundreds of times — at games, ceremonies, Fourth of July celebrations. We appreciate the performance. But how often do we actually listen to the words?
Here’s what Francis Scott Key was really describing: It’s the morning of September 14, 1814. The British Navy has spent the night bombarding Fort McHenry in Baltimore. Key watched from a ship in the harbor, powerless to do anything but wait. At twilight, he’d seen the flag flying over the fort. Then darkness fell, and it vanished from view.
For hours, the only way he could tell whether the fort had fallen was by the light of the battle itself — each flash of cannon fire and bursting bomb just long enough to confirm the flag was still there. Still flying. Not yet defeated.
Then dawn came, the bombardment stopped, and through the morning mist, Key saw it: the flag, still standing.
That’s the song. Not a pageant. A man in the darkness, searching the sky for proof his nation had survived the night.
This September 12th, 15,000 Utah County residents will stand along a 17.76-mile trail, each holding a flag — the same flag that gave exhausted soldiers hope in the smoke over Baltimore harbor. It still means something. It’s still worth standing for.
The Verse We Never Sing
There are four verses to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” We sing one. And it may not be the most powerful one.
There are four verses to “The Star-Spangled Banner.” We sing one — and it may not be the most powerful.
Francis Scott Key wrote the final verse as the sun rose over Fort McHenry and the smoke cleared. Having just watched his young nation survive a brutal night of bombardment, his thoughts turned to God. He called America a “heaven-rescued land” — not a country that had saved itself through strength alone, but one that had been preserved by something greater. He had watched that preservation happen flash by flash, through a long and terrifying night.
This wasn’t a small footnote. The War of 1812 was the first major test of whether the new United States would survive as an independent nation. Key believed the Revolution had been won by the hand of God — and now, a generation later, that same hand had held the line again.
From that conviction came the phrase that would become one of America’s most enduring mottos: In God is our trust. Not a slogan. A battle-worn declaration from a man who’d spent the night wondering if his country still existed.
The verse ends, as the anthem always does, with the banner waving over the land of the free and the home of the brave. But by then, Key had already told us what he believed made that freedom possible.
On September 12th, as 15,000 Utahns stand along a 17.76-mile trail holding the flag Key once searched for in the smoke, that final verse is worth remembering. We are still, as he wrote, a nation that trusts. And the banner is still worth raising.