Flag of Delaware

How to read it

The flag law, 29 Del. C. § 306, describes a background of colonial blue surrounding a diamond of buff, which holds the coat of arms in the colours set by law, with “December 7, 1787” underneath. The colours are fixed by the Textile Color Card Association: colonial blue is “arno blue”, Cable No. 10663, and buff “golden beige”, Cable No. 10781, as measured by the National Bureau of Standards in a test dated November 18, 1954, on file with the Delaware Public Archives. The section colours the arms too: the husbandman in grey-brown trousers, a red shirt and a brown hat, with a brown hoe; the rifleman in green, with buff binding, bag and leggings; the shield framed in shaded yellow, with an orange top panel, a blue centre and a white lower panel, a red-brown ox, green grass and corn and yellow wheat; a twisted blue and silver wreath; a ship with a dark hull and white sails; and the date in white. A commission authorized in 1913 chose the flag on July 24, 1913. Its design was left out of the Delaware Code, and a law approved on June 13, 1955 wrote it in. The Governor’s flag is the same with a gold fringe, carried on a pole topped with a model of a blue hen’s fighting cock (§ 307).

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What the coat of arms shows

The arms come from the Great Seal (§ 301): a shield divided across, gold above with a sheaf of wheat and an ear of corn, silver below with an ox, and a wavy blue band between; a husbandman with a hilling hoe and a rifleman as supporters; and a ship under full sail as the crest. Delaware.gov explains each part. The wheat sheaf, from the Sussex County seal, is Delaware’s farming; the ship, New Castle County’s shipbuilding and the state’s coastal trade; the corn, from the Kent County seal, farming again; the farmer’s hoe, the central role of farming; the militiaman, the citizen-soldier; the ox, animal husbandry; and the water above the ox, the Delaware River.

Telling it from New Jersey’s flag

New Jersey’s flag has the same two colours the other way round: its whole field is buff, with no diamond and no date, and its arms show Liberty and Ceres either side of a shield of three ploughs.