After all, he is father of Flag Day. As an elementary school teacher at Stony Hill School in Waubeka, WI (some 30 miles north of Milwaukee), Cigrand staged what's considered the first observance of Flag Day in 1885.
Cigrand thought June 14 would be the perfect day to honor the flag, because it was on that day in 1777 that the Continental Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes.
Cigrand's quest didn't end in Waubeka. He spoke around the country in support of the holiday, eventually moving to a bigger stage, Chicago, to attend dental school. It was there that that Cigrand made a public proposal for a Flag Day, which was picked up by local magazines and newspapers. Cigrand was managing editor of a magazine called American Standard, created to promote patriotism.
Further getting the Flag Day train rolling was a series of public school children's celebrations in Chicago in 1894. More than 300,000 kids took part. Another important development in Flag Day took place in 1889 in New York City, when teacher George Balch staged a ceremony for students at his school.
The idea of observing Flag Day was adopted by the State Board of Education of New York a few years later. It was decreed in New York that all state buildings be adorned with the flag on June 14 in 1894.
Two decades later, Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane gave a Flag Day speech, during which he echoed what he said the flag had told him that morning: "I am what you make me; nothing more, I swing before your eyes as a bright gleam of color, a symbol of yourself.''
Finally President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation that officially established June 14 as Flag Day. An act of Congress established National Flag Day in 1949.
To this day, Cigrad is still remembered in Waubeka. A street bears his name, the Stony Hill School has been restored and a bust of him is displayed at the National Flag Day Americanism Center.
Curiously, Flag Day isn't a federal holiday. Another oddity: American school kids have been taught for decades that Betsy Ross made the first American flag, and the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia, which opened as a public museum in 1937, is her shrine and celebrates that status.
However, Marc Leepson, author of "Flag: An American Biography," recently wrote in the Washington Post, "The Betsy Ross story is the most tenacious piece of fiction involving the flag. There is simply no credible historical evidence --- letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, bills of sale --- that Ross either made or had a hand in designing the American flag before it made its debut in 1777.
