If you go to a Flag Day, Independence Day, or other patriotic celebration, it’s likely you’ll hear the song “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” or “America the Beautiful.”

“My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” was used as a de facto national anthem before the adoption of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in 1931, and “America the Beautiful” was considered for use as an official anthem.

And they both have a Newton connection.

“My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” was written by Samuel Francis Smith, the minister of First Baptist Church in Newton. “America the Beautiful” was written by Katharine Lee Bates, who attended Newton High School.

Smith was the minister at First Baptist Church in Newton from 1842 to 1854, but he was not from Newton originally. Rather, he was from Boston, and attended Harvard College before heading to Andover Theological Seminary (at the time, still in Andover) to study to become a Baptist minister. It was there that a friend asked him to translate German children’s music.

When he saw that one of the songs was a German patriotic hymn, Smith was inspired to write an American one.

He did not realize that the tune he selected was the same as “God Save the King.”

“I do not share the regret of those who deem it an evil that the national tune of Britain and America is the same,” Smith wrote. “On the contrary, I deem it a new and beautiful tie of union between mother and daughter.”

“My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” was first performed at Boston’s Park Street Church on July 4, 1831. It became immensely popular.

Later, Smith would become frustrated that the poem he wrote at 22 overshadowed his lengthy ecclesiastical career. Smith attended Harvard College with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., who was also a poet. Holmes wrote a poem about Smith for one of their reunions: “And there’s a nice youngster of excellent pith, fate tried to conceal it by naming it Smith; but he shouted a song for the brave and the free; just read on his medal, “My Country, of Thee.”

Smith wrote over 150 other hymns, as well as essays and books. Some of those books were about the history of Newton, which are available at the Newton Free Library. He and his wife lived in Newton Centre for 53 years, although they made numerous mission trips throughout the world. This was an important cause to him: after leaving the pastorate of First Baptist, he became the editor of the Baptist Missionary Union’s publications. The Samuel Francis Smith Homestead Society was established in 1958 with the intent of preserving his home, but unfortunately it burned down in 1968/1969.

Bates’ father was a Congregationalist minister in Falmouth, but he died shortly after her birth.

Her mother later moved the family to Needham, in the part of town that would later become Wellesley. Bates initially attended Needham High before switching to Newton. She attended college when very few women did so, and she later taught English at her alma mater, Wellesley College.

She never married, but she had a lifelong companion in fellow Wellesley professor Katharine Coman.

“One touch of you were worth a thousand creeds,” wrote Bates after Coman’s death.

Faculty were poorly paid and consequently would seek out summer opportunities to supplement their income, leading Bates to teach a summer course at Colorado College in 1893.

Upon seeing the Rocky Mountains for the first time, she was so overcome by emotion that she penned ‘Pikes Peak,’ which she submitted to a church magazine in 1895. She was surprised by the immensely positive reaction it garnered. The poem would be set to music by Samuel Ward of New Jersey, and the combination would become known as ‘America the Beautiful’ in 1910.

Bates’ other significant contribution to American culture comes from her poem Goody Claus, about the wife of Santa Claus and how she gets ignored. (‘Goody’ here being a shortened form of ‘Goodwife,’ the title Puritans gave to married women).

“Why should you have all the glory of the joyous Christmas story, and poor little Goody Santa Claus have nothing but the work?” Bates wrote.

While the poem itself today is less known, the idea of a Mrs. Claus lives on.

While Newton may not have the Revolutionary war history that other Massachusetts towns can claim, two of its residents have played an important role in shaping American patriotic sentiment for generations.