Flag of Tennessee

How to read it

The flag was adopted by Chapter 498 of the Public Acts of 1905, passed and approved on 17 April 1905, which the Tennessee Secretary of State prints in full. The act makes the flag one and two thirds times as long as it is wide, or 3:5. The field is red and ends at the fly in a blue bar, separated from the red by a white stripe one fifth as wide as the bar, the bar and stripe together one eighth of the flag’s width. In the centre of the red is a blue circle half the width of the flag, edged with a white ring as wide as the white stripe. Inside are three white five-pointed stars spaced evenly round the centre, their inner points nearly touching and their outer points nearly touching the edge of the circle, set so that no two stars line up with the side or end of the flag and the highest is the one nearest the upper corner by the staff. The act names red, white and blue but no shades.

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What do the three stars on the Tennessee flag mean?

They are the three grand divisions of the state, East, Middle and West Tennessee. Reeves wrote that the stars are “of pure white, representing the three grand divisions of the state”, bound together by the endless circle of the blue field into one, “an indissoluble trinity”. In a letter of January 1903 he called the red “the symbol of protection, or defense”. He explained the rest as practical choices: the blue bar at the end keeps the flag from looking all crimson when it hangs limp, and the white edges make the other colours stand out.

How Reeves got it adopted

Reeves, born in Johnson City in 1876, was captain of Company F of the Third Infantry, Tennessee National Guard, when he first tried in 1903. Representative S. E. Miller introduced his bill on 28 January 1903, then learned that Tennessee already had a flag, adopted in 1897; the bill did not come to a vote. In 1905 Representative Walter W. Faw introduced it again on 8 March, and it passed both houses on 17 April 1905. The first official flag flew over the Johnson City armory on 22 May 1905, the Archives of Appalachia at East Tennessee State University says; that flag is now with the Tennessee State Museum. The design went into the Tennessee Code in 1932, and the scholar Steven A. Knowlton found it was 1960 before the flag flew over the Capitol regularly.