Flag of West Virginia

How to read it

The flag was adopted by Senate Joint Resolution No. 18, approved by the Legislature on 7 March 1929. It gives the flag the proportions of the United States ensign and a field of pure white with the state coat of arms in its proper colours at the centre, showing the date of admission to the Union and the motto “Montani Semper Liberi” (Mountaineers Are Always Free). Above the arms is a ribbon lettered “State of West Virginia”, round their lower part a wreath of Rhododendron maximum, the state flower since 1903, and on all four sides a strip of blue. Flags used in parades are trimmed with gold fringe on three sides. The coat of arms is the front of the Great Seal, adopted on 26 September 1863 and designed by Joseph H. Diss Debar, which the state constitution (Article II, section 7) keeps as the great seal.

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The coat of arms, piece by piece

In the centre is a large rock draped in ivy and carrying the date of admission, 20 June 1863. On the left stands a farmer in hunting clothes, his right arm on the handles of a plough and his left holding a woodsman’s axe, with a sheaf of wheat and a cornstalk beside him. On the right stands a miner with a pickaxe, beside an anvil with a sledgehammer on it. In front of the rock two rifles cross, with a Phrygian cap, the cap of liberty, where they meet. The motto is on a red ribbon at the foot.

Earlier West Virginia flags

The Legislature authorised the first state flag on 28 January 1864, and each of the state’s regiments got one before the Civil War ended: dark blue silk with gold fringe, the state seal on one side and the national coat of arms on the other, e-WV, the West Virginia Encyclopedia, says. In 1905 the Legislature adopted a white flag with a sprig of rhododendron on the front and the seal and motto on the back. It proved impractical, since its two sides differed and the colours showed through, and the corrected version of 1907 was expensive to make. Flags made unofficially for the 1913 Semi-Centennial at Wheeling had the rhododendron wreath curving up round the seal, close to the 1929 design.