Still Flying High: Vermont's State Flag Turns 100 

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• Courtesy Of Andrew Liptak
• A flag in the Vermont Historical Society collection

Though the Vermont state flag flies across the Green Mountains, many Vermonters can conjure only a fuzzy mental image of it — a seal with a pastoral scene, a blue backdrop. Perhaps they know it includes the state motto, "Freedom and Unity." Historian Andrew Liptak said of the flag: "You see it, but you don't see it."

After turning 100 last Thursday, the flag merits a closer look. Liptak and his colleagues at the Vermont Historical Society have been researching its roots and even have a delicate prototype flag in their collection.

The flag's focal point is the Vermont coat of arms, which was first used in 1862 by one of Vermont's Civil War regiments. The coat of arms' iconography — a pine tree, a cow and sheaves of wheat — can be traced back to the Great Seal that Ira Allen, a founder of Vermont, designed in 1779.

Earlier flag iterations had less to do with Vermont's flora and fauna. The original, made official in 1803, followed national precedent: 17 stars and 17 stripes (then the number of states in the union), with "VERMONT" across the top.

In 1837, legislators added a small image of the coat of arms in the flag's blue left corner. Yet this version still looked an awful lot like the American flag. So, in 1923, the state eschewed stars and stripes and adopted the blue regimental flag — an expression of pride in Vermont's landscape and militia.

The flag, Liptak told Seven Days, "is a representation of a Vermont, one type of Vermont."

In its 100 years, the Vermont state flag has flown far and wide, on myriad public buildings, as well as atop Mount Everest, at the North Pole and on the surface of the moon — on not one but two Apollo missions.

A centennial is not only a "nice round number," Liptak said, but an opportunity to explore the ways past Vermonters sought "to represent themselves, their home and the ideals that they thought were important."

Visitors can view regimental flags from the Civil War at the Vermont Statehouse and see other notable flags and memorabilia at the Vermont History Museum in Montpelier.