ERIE, Pennsylvania — Several large pieces of cobalt-blue glass panels bearing “Don’t Give Up the Ship” and a bold likeness of Commodore Perry lay broken at the top of the third-floor stairs of the old Park Place building in the city’s main square.

If ever there were a motto that exemplifies a place and her people, it would be those five words Perry had stitched on a flag, words that inspired him over 200 years ago when he bore the flag in his unlikely defeat of the British at the Battle of Lake Erie.