Flag of North Carolina

How to read it

The flag law is section 144-1 of the North Carolina General Statutes, from an act of 1885 (chapter 291), last amended in 1991. It describes a blue union with a white star in the centre, a gilt “N” to its left and a gilt “C” to its right, the circle containing them one third the width of the union. The fly is two bars of equal size, red above white, each as long as the union is high. Above the star a gilt scroll in a half circle reads “May 20th 1775” in black letters, and a scroll below reads “April 12th 1776”. The whole flag is half as long again as it is high, which makes it 2:3. NCpedia says the design has changed little since 1885: only its length and two commas.

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The two dates

The upper date, 20 May 1775, is the traditional date of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, which NCpedia calls controversial and since debunked. The 1885 law kept it and changed the lower date to 12 April 1776 in honour of the Halifax Resolves.

The first state flag, 1861

North Carolina had no official state flag until the constitutional convention of 1861, NCpedia says. The convention’s flag had a red field with a white star, “May 20, 1775” above the star and “May 20, 1861” below it, the day the state seceded from the Union, and two bars, blue and white. It seems to have come from a design suggested by William G. Browne, an artist in Raleigh, and the ordinance was ratified on 22 June 1861. The legislature replaced it in 1885 with the flag flown today.

Telling it from the Texas flag

Texas’s flag has the same layout: a vertical blue band at the pole with a white star, beside two horizontal bars. The order of the bars is the quickest test. Texas has white over red; North Carolina has red over white, and adds the gilt N and C and the two dated scrolls.