Made in the U.S.A.
Made in Mathews County.
Made for the nation’s 250th anniversary celebration.
Chances are that these labels are true if you purchase a United States flag with embroidered stars. If the flag is made by Annin Flagmakers, you can be certain that the field of stars embroidered on a blue background came from Mathews.
Star Fields, LLC, is the Cobbs Creek star field-making division of Annin. It began operations in 1970 as D&P Embroidery, and was sold to Annin in 2006. Many of its employees have been making star fields for decades, and members of the founding Downs family are still working there.
Bruce Love of Moon, whose grandfather Ray Downs was one of the D&P founders, began as a helper there in 1992 at the age of 19 and has worked his way up to plant manager. He is a flag man, heart and soul. “I was spinning my wheels for a year after graduation” from Mathews High, he said. “My grandfather said ‘try it out’” and he is still there.
Love said the flag design for America’s semiquincentennial was approved by a national commission last year. By September, Love and production manager James Ramsey had worked out how to stitch stars for this specialty flag, which was placed into production. The company produced 10,000 fields last year, and about 4,000 this year so far. Love said the demand is picking up.
He said the 250 flag is made with special care and quality with “a very high stitch count, it’s an extra fine product. The entire piece has 16,500 stitches” for a 3-foot by 5-foot flag. The field has 13 stars in a Betsy Ross pattern with the number 250 stitched in the center of the circle. In comparison, a 3’x5’ flag with 50 stars in the field usually has 7,500 stitches, Love said. The extra quality comes in part from a layer of under-stitching of each figure that raises its profile.
When Star Fields completes a batch of fields, it is shipped to Annin plants in South Boston, Virginia, or Coshocton, Ohio, where the red and white stripes are applied to complete each flag.
The flags are not sold at the Cobbs Creek plant (as they were many years ago), but at a number of retail outlets, which can be found online at annin.com.
About the company
The fields for stars are designed on a computer; the designs are sent directly to the Epoca embroidery machines which are set up and maintained by the staff.
Stars can be stitched for flags that, when finished, measure anywhere from 12 by 18 inches to 12 by 18 feet. The blue fabric can be polyester, nylon or cotton. Huge bolts of fabric in many sizes are cut to appropriate lengths for setup on the embroidery machines.
Love said Star Fields employs 42 people working on day shifts and night shifts. It started with 135 employees. Automation has made production “less labor intensive,” he said.
Interest in the 250 flag has been increasing and the plant is operating with seven shifts in the daytime and four at night, Love said. Another extra-busy time followed the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, when the company, then D&P, was swamped with orders, according to a Gazette-Journal article from that period.
Getting the company up to speed and star fields ready for the nation’s 250th celebration and to meet the demand for specialty flags “has been a fun challenge and an interesting challenge,” Love said.