House Flags of U.S. Shipping Companies

Sources of information on US houseflags

Some useful sources of information on US houseflags are:

• Brown's Flags and Funnels, 1926 wed26] and 1971 [stg71] editions
• Stewart's Flags and Funnels 1953 [ste53] and 1963 [ssy63] editions
• The 1934 National Geographic flags article [gsh34]
• The US Navy's 1961 H.O. 100 [usn61]

Other printed sources include extensive reliance on the shipping line advertisements, china, stationery, playing cards, etc., depicted on various internet sites, especially www.steamship.net (no longer available) and www.cabinclass.com. For nineteenth-century flags, I used a number of contemporary pictures reprinted in A. B. C. Whipple, The Clipper Ships (Alexandria, Va: Time-Life Books, 1980), particularly a chart that appears to be circa 1855 entitled "Private Signals of the Merchants of New York," which I cite throughout as PSMNY. In addition, the archives section of the site of the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, www.pem.org, has a large number of paintings, many of which are also in The Clipper Ships.

For the background history on the various firms, companies, and lines, my main sources have been:

• Rene de la Pedraja, A Historical Dictionary of the U.S. Merchant Marine and Shipping Industry Since the Introduction of Steam (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1994)
• N. R. P. Bonsor, North Atlantic Seaway (New York: Arco Press, 1955-1975) (This five volume set also has descriptions of many of the house flags of these as well as non-US lines.)
• Carl C. Cutler, Greyhounds of the Sea: The Story of the American Clipper Ship, 3rd ed. (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1984; originally pub. 1930)

For contemporary companies, I've checked when possible against the websites of the company's themselves.

Joe McMillan, 19 August 2001

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