She’s a “modern day Betsy Ross” – or at least that was how Sharon Hopkins’s son, Jeff, the new service manager at Massey Automotive, described his mother after she was able to repair the dealership’s gigantic American flag.

Since the early 1990s, the flag has stood proud atop the hill on the South Bypass, and on this Independence Day holiday, it will be no different; however, it did take a little bit of work to make sure the repairs were done in time, Hopkins said.

“When Jeff heard the flag needed to be repaired, he said, ‘I think my mom can do something like that to fix it,’” Hopkins said. “They wanted it to be done by the Fourth of July, and I got it done – just in the nick of time.”

Hopkins, who opened the Three Notch Cottage Quilt Shoppe in 2004, used her 50-plus years of sewing experience to mend the frayed, tattered and torn edges.

“It’s made out of nylon and weighs a ton,” she said. “The sides and bottom were just shredded. I had to have help to lay it out on my carport to work on it. It took up the whole thing. It is that big.”

Hopkins said she trimmed six inches off the edge and then used a Janome sewing machine to put in four seams down the edges to add stability.

“Hopefully, that will keep it from fraying as bad,” she said. “It is a huge flag, and I’m glad that I was able to fix it. My slogan is, ‘Finished is better than perfect,’ so I made it as good as I possibly could by trying to recreate what was there to begin with. I think I did an OK job.”

Staff at Massey Automotive said it was more than an “OK job.”

Jean Carter, a Massey Automotive employee, said the dealership doesn’t look the same when there isn’t a flag flying.

“It wouldn’t be right that there wasn’t a flag flying here – especially on the Fourth of July,” Carter said.