Flag of Arizona

How to read it

The flag is set by Arizona Revised Statutes § 41-851, which also makes blue and old gold the state colours. The lower half is a blue field. The upper half is divided into thirteen equal rays, six yellow and seven red, which start at the centre of the lower half’s top edge and run out to the edges of the flag. A copper-coloured five-pointed star sits over the centre, its upper points one foot (30 cm) from the top and its lower points one foot from the bottom. The law gives a flag 1.2 metres (4 feet) high and 1.8 metres (6 feet) long with a star 61 cm (2 feet) across, and other sizes keep those proportions; the red and blue are the shades of the US flag. Arizona Highways, the state’s magazine, says the flag became official in February 1917, five years after statehood, on a design by Colonel Charles Harris.

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A rifle team’s banner

The design began as a banner for a shooting match. Arizona Highways, citing the Arizona State Library, says Arizona’s National Guard rifle team was the only one at the National Rifle Matches without a flag, so its captain, Colonel Charles Harris, drew a temporary banner for the 1910 match, and May Hicks Curtis Hill, the wife of one of the guardsmen, sewed it. The state flag based on it became law in February 1917, but the public did not see it until that September, when Governor Thomas Campbell presented it.

What the rays and the star stand for

The statute gives one meaning: the copper star rising from a blue field in front of a setting sun. The Office of the Arizona Governor adds more. It says the thirteen rays stand for the 13 original colonies and the western setting sun, that the red and yellow come from the Spanish flag Coronado carried into the region, that the blue is the blue of the US flag, and that the copper star marks Arizona as the largest copper-producing state. Arizona Highways, citing the Arizona Senate, describes the rays as Spanish Colonial heritage and a setting sun, and the star as the state’s copper industry.

Arizona’s and New Mexico’s flags side by side

Both use red and yellow for Spain. The Arizona governor’s office takes the colours from the Spanish flag Coronado carried; the New Mexico Secretary of State calls New Mexico’s red and yellow the colours of Isabel of Castile that the conquistadors brought. The designs differ: Arizona’s yellow and red are rays over a blue lower half, with a copper star, while New Mexico’s flag is all yellow with a single red Zia sun symbol in the centre.