President William Emmerich offered a Veterans Day presentation at the Pascal Center in Glen Burnie on Monday, November 9, 2026. His lecture, titled “Our Flag Is Still There!”, told the story of the Battle of Baltimore and of how the national anthem came to be written within sight of Baltimore Town.

The men he spoke about are the Old Defenders. They were not a standing army. They were the militia companies, the tradesmen, the clerks and the sailors of Baltimore and the surrounding counties who turned out when the British landed at North Point on September 12, 1814, and who stood in the line that met the advance on the road to the city. What that day bought was time. The attack on Baltimore by land was checked, and the bombardment of Fort McHenry that followed through the night of September 13 and into the morning of September 14 failed to open the harbor.

Francis Scott Key watched that bombardment from a vessel in the river, held under guard after securing the release of Dr. William Beanes of Upper Marlboro. When the firing stopped, he did not know which flag he would see at first light. The lines he wrote when he saw it are the ones the country still sings, and the question in them is the plainest question of that night: whether the flag was still there.

For much of the nineteenth century the survivors were honored by that name, the Old Defenders, and Defenders Day on September 12 remains a Maryland holiday. The Society itself was organized in 1814 by veterans of North Point and the defense of Fort McHenry, and was incorporated by their sons and grandsons on October 23, 1889. Its members are their descendants, and the work of marking their graves and keeping their records goes on.