Flag of Connecticut

How to read it

The General Assembly of 1897 gave the official description of the flag: azure blue silk, 1.68 m (5 ft 6 in) long and 1.32 m (4 ft 4 in) wide, with the armorial bearings in white silk, the design in natural colours and the shield’s border embroidered in gold and silver. Below the shield is a white streamer, cleft at each end and bordered in gold and browns, with the motto in dark blue. Governor O. Vincent Coffin brought the first proposal for a state flag to the General Assembly on May 29, 1895, prompted by a memorial from the Anna Warner Bailey Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The arms themselves were adopted by law only on March 24, 1931: a rococo shield with a white field and three grapevines, supported and bearing fruit, over a white streamer with the motto in “medium bold Gothic” letters. CT Humanities notes that the arms were on the flag from 1897, before the state officially recognised them. The motto is also Connecticut’s state motto.

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Where the three vines come from

The seal George Fenwick brought from England in 1639 for the Saybrook Colony had 15 grapevines and the motto in a slightly different order, “Sustinet Qui Transtulit”. It passed to the Connecticut Colony when Saybrook joined it in 1644. A new colonial seal of 1711 reduced the vines to three, which CT Humanities says likely stand for Hartford, Windsor and Wethersfield. The state seal of 1784 kept the design and changed only the Latin around the edge, to “Sigillum Reipublicae Connecticutensis”, the Seal of the State of Connecticut.

Where the motto comes from

No one is sure. Charles Hoadly, one of the earliest state librarians, linked it to a passage in the Book of Psalms in his book The Public Seal of Connecticut (1889), CT Humanities says. The law gives the translation “He Who Transplanted Still Sustains”.

Telling it from Vermont’s flag

Both are blue with a shield over a ribbon. Vermont’s flag has a landscape on its shield, a pine tree, a red cow and sheaves of wheat before blue mountains, with a buck’s head above. Connecticut’s shield is white with three grapevines and nothing else, and has no crest.