The Flag on Prospect Hill: A Response to Byron DeLear

On 1 January 1776, a flag was hoisted on Prospect Hill, outside Boston, to mark the establishment of the American Continental Army. Since 1849, histories of the Revolutionary War have stated that the flag was the so-called “Grand Union” flag, consisting of 13 red and white stripes with the British union crosses in the canton. (Figure 1) In 2006, at a meeting of the Flag House Symposium in Baltimore, I presented a hypothesis that the flag raised on that historic occasion was actually a British union flag. (Figure 2)1 In October 2013, Byron DeLear presented a paper at the NAVA 47 conference in Salt Lake City that challenged my hypothesis, and asserted that the historical facts support the “conventional history.”2 This paper will show that DeLear did not fully address the arguments presented in my original paper, and that the evidence he presented fails to support his conclusions and in some cases actually contradicts them.