Members of the Society gathered at Fort McHenry on Friday, September 11, 2026, to take their place in the Defenders Day parade, the march through Locust Point that opens the fort’s commemoration of the defense of Baltimore.

Defenders Day falls on September 12 and is a Maryland legal holiday. The National Park Service calls it Baltimore’s oldest holiday, celebrated since 1815, which is to say the city began marking the anniversary within a year of the battle and has not stopped since.

What it marks is three days in September 1814. On the 12th, the city militia met the British advance at North Point, and the delay they imposed cost the attacking force its commander and its momentum. Through the night of the 13th and into the morning of the 14th, the fleet bombarded Fort McHenry and failed to pass it. Francis Scott Key, watching from the water, wrote the verses that became the national anthem.

The 2026 commemoration ran from the 11th to the 13th. The parade stepped off at seven in the evening on the Friday, with National Park Service rangers and the fifes and drums of the Fort McHenry Guard, and the weekend went on to the recreated raising of the garrison flag on Saturday evening and the fireworks that followed it. The fort tied the whole weekend to the 250th anniversary, counting its own history from the earthworks at Whetstone Point in 1776 rather than from 1814.

The Society came with its banner and its colors, and with members in the uniform of 1814, and took its place in the line of march with the crowd out along the sidewalks in the last of the light. The line on the banner is the plainest statement of why the Society turns out at all: descendants of the patriots of the War of 1812.