Flag of Florida

How to read it

Florida Statutes § 15.012 describes the flag: the state seal, its diameter half the hoist (the flag’s height), in the centre of a white field, and red bars one fifth of the hoist wide running from each corner toward the centre, as far as the seal’s outer rim. The flag is to “conform with standard commercial sizes”; the law names no shades and no ratio of height to length. The Department of State says the present design dates from 1900, when voters ratified a constitutional amendment, based on a joint resolution of the legislature of 1899, adding the red bars in the form of a St Andrew’s cross; from 1868 to 1900 the flag was white with the seal in the centre. When the constitution was rewritten in 1968 the dimensions were dropped from it and became statute law (chapter 70-300 of 1970). The seal, under § 15.03, shows the sun’s rays over a highland in the distance, a sabal palmetto palm, a steamboat on water and an Indian woman scattering flowers, ringed by the words “Great Seal of the State of Florida: In God We Trust”, the state’s motto since 2006.

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Telling it from Alabama’s flag

Alabama’s flag is also a red diagonal cross on white, but it has no seal and its bars run unbroken through the centre. On Florida’s flag the bars stop at the rim of the seal, which is half the flag’s height across.

The seal in the centre

The seal in use today dates from 1985, when Secretary of State George Firestone presented a revised Great Seal to the Governor and Cabinet. The Department of State says it corrected errors in the old one: it shows a Seminole woman in place of a woman of the Western Plains, a more accurate steamboat, and a sabal palm in place of the cocoa palm, as the Legislature had prescribed in 1970. The 1868 joint resolution that first described the seal asked for “a cocoa tree”; the sabal palmetto had become the state tree in 1953. Earlier versions differed widely, the department says: the first official seal had mountains in the background, which Florida does not have, and another gave the woman a feather headdress.