Flag of Ohio

How to read it

Section 5.01 of the Ohio Revised Code (in its present wording since 1 November 2002) says the flag is burgee-shaped, with three red and two white horizontal stripes. The union is a blue triangle whose base is the staff edge and whose apex is the centre of the middle red stripe, holding 17 white five-pointed stars grouped around a red disc on a white circular “O”. The proportions of the flag and its parts follow the official design on file with the Secretary of State; the law itself gives no measurements. Ohio has a pledge to the flag (§ 5.013) and a folding procedure (§ 5.014) whose total of 17 folds stands for Ohio as the 17th state. The flag was adopted on 9 May 1902. The Cleveland architect John Eisenmann designed it to fly over the Ohio building at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, as a pennant shape that could be shown in any position without changing its meaning, and Representative William S. McKinnon proposed it as the state flag, Ohio Magazine says.

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What the stripes meant in 1902

The newspapers of 1902 read the flag differently from today’s law. The East Liverpool Evening News Review of 15 March 1902, quoted by Ohio Magazine, said the triangles stood for the hills and valleys of the state seal, the five stripes for the five states carved out of the Northwest Territory, and the circle for the original Northwest Territory, with the 13 stars for the original states and four more for Ohio as the 17th.

Telling it from Nepal’s flag

Nepal’s national flag is one of the few flags in the world that isn’t a rectangle, Store norske leksikon says: a double triangle, adopted by a king of Gorkha where earlier flags had been single triangular pennants. Ohio’s is one swallow-tailed piece with stripes and stars; Nepal’s is two triangles, one above the other.