It’s one of the most famous photos in history. You’ve seen it. Three firefighters, covered in gray ash, hoisting a dusty American flag at 9/11 amidst the twisted steel of the World Trade Center. It felt like a defiant "we are still here" to the rest of the world. Thomas E. Franklin, a photographer for The Record, captured that moment on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. But here’s the thing that most people don't actually know: the flag in that iconic photo disappeared for over a decade. It wasn't just sitting in a museum. It was gone.
People forget how chaotic those first few days were. There wasn't a master plan for the "relics" of the site. Everyone was just trying to breathe, trying to find survivors, trying to make sense of the skyline being empty. The flag itself wasn't even from the Twin Towers. It was taken from a yacht named Star of America, which was docked at North Cove on the Hudson River. The boat’s owner, Shirley Dreifus, and her late husband Spiros Kopelakis, had no idea their flag was about to become the soul of a grieving nation.
The Mystery of the Disappearing Flag
By the time the flag was supposed to be part of a ceremony at Yankee Stadium just weeks later, it had already been swapped. This is where the story gets weird. A flag was sent to the stadium, and later to the USS Theodore Roosevelt, but it was the wrong size. It was much bigger than the one Franklin photographed. The original was a 3-by-5-foot flag. The one being flown around the world as the "9/11 flag" was a 5-by-8-foot version.
How does that even happen?
Basically, in the madness of the recovery efforts, things got shuffled. Or maybe someone wanted a souvenir. For years, the original American flag at 9/11 was just... missing. It became a cold case. Shirley Dreifus eventually sued the city, not for money, but to find out where her flag went. The mystery stayed cold until 2014. That’s when a man who identified himself only as "Brian" walked into a fire station in Everett, Washington.
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He had a plastic bag. Inside was a flag.
How a Mystery Man in Washington Solved a New York Cold Case
Brian told the firefighters he had seen a show on the History Channel called Brad Meltzer's Lost History. They had done a segment on the missing flag. Brian claimed he had been given the flag by an employee at NOAA who had received it from a 9/11 widow. It sounds like a movie plot, right? But the Everett Police Department didn't just take his word for it. They treated it like a forensic investigation.
Detective Mike Atwood and Detective Jim Massingale spent months on this. They looked at the dust. They looked at the hardware. They even consulted with forensic scientists to compare the grain of the ash on the flag to the specific chemical signature of the dust from Lower Manhattan.
- The metal clips (snap hooks) were a match.
- The size was exactly 3 feet by 5 feet.
- The tape used to secure the flag to the halyard matched the photos.
- Forensic tests confirmed the dust was "consistent" with the WTC site.
It was the real deal. After years of being lost in a plastic bag on the other side of the country, the American flag at 9/11 was finally identified. Brian, the man who brought it in, vanished. He didn't want the reward. He didn't want the fame. He just wanted the flag to go home.
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Why the Flag Matters More Than the Fabric
Symbols are tricky things. To some, it's just polyester and nylon. But on that Tuesday, it was the only thing that didn't feel broken. When Dan McWilliams, George Johnson, and Billy Eisengrein raised that flag at 5:01 PM, they weren't doing it for a photo op. They were doing it because the pile was a graveyard and they needed to mark the ground with something that wasn't rubble.
The flag eventually made its way back to New York. In September 2016, it was officially unveiled at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. It’s there now. You can go see it. It’s surprisingly small when you see it in person. It’s also surprisingly clean, considering where it’s been.
The Ethics of Preservation
There’s a lot of debate about what we should do with items from 11-September. Some people think everything should be preserved. Others think the site should have been left alone as a cemetery. When it comes to the American flag at 9/11, the consensus is usually different because it wasn't a piece of the building; it was a piece of the response.
It represents the shift from the horror of the morning to the resilience of the afternoon.
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If you're looking for lessons in how we handle national trauma, look at how we treated this flag. We lost it. We replaced it with a "better" (bigger) version because the truth was embarrassing. Then, we spent years obsessing over finding the original because the "fake" one didn't carry the same weight. We crave authenticity when we're hurting.
Actionable Insights for Remembering the History
If you want to truly understand the significance of this event or honor the history of the American flag at 9/11, don't just look at the memes or the posters. Do the work to understand the timeline.
- Visit the 9/11 Memorial & Museum: Seeing the actual flag in its glass case provides a perspective that a digital screen cannot. You can see the specific wear and tear that forensic experts used to verify it.
- Read the Forensic Reports: If you're a nerd for the details, look into how the Everett Police Department used "pollen analysis" and "dust morphology" to prove the flag's origin. It’s a masterclass in modern investigation.
- Support First Responder Charities: The men who raised the flag—and thousands of others—suffered long-term health effects from the dust at Ground Zero. Organizations like the FealGood Foundation work specifically on these issues.
- Fact-Check the Lore: Many "9/11 flags" exist. Some were flown over the wreckage later; some were carried into battle in Afghanistan. Ensure you are looking at the Star of America flag if you want the one from the Franklin photo.
The story of the flag is a story of loss, confusion, and a very long journey home. It’s a reminder that even when things are literally buried under millions of tons of steel, they have a way of surfacing when people refuse to stop looking. Honestly, the fact that it ended up in a fire station in Washington state is still one of the most "only in America" endings possible. It’s back in Manhattan now, where it belongs, sitting quietly in the dark of the museum, finally off the yacht and out of the bag.
To understand the full scope of the recovery, you should research the "Fresh Kills" sorting process. That is where most of the physical history of that day was painstakingly sifted through by hand. It’s a grim but necessary part of the story that explains why so few personal items survived compared to the massive symbols like the flag.