ALAlabama State Symbols

Alabama is the Yellowhammer State, and the name has nothing to do with birdwatching. In 1861 a company of Confederate cavalry from Huntsville rode into camp at Hopkinsville, Kentucky in new uniforms trimmed with bright yellow cloth at the collar, cuffs and coattails. The soldiers already there shouted "yellowhammer" at them, after the flash of gold under a northern flicker's wing. The bird became the official state bird in 1927 and the nickname spread to the whole state. Alabama also answers to Heart of Dixie, a slogan the state chamber of commerce pushed onto license plates in the 1950s.

Official state symbols

The camellia took the state flower title from the goldenrod, which had held it since 1927 and lost it to a lobbying campaign by Alabama garden clubs. The state tree was designated simply as "the southern pine" in 1949, which satisfied nobody, so the legislature pinned it down to the longleaf pine in 1997. The motto is Latin for "We dare defend our rights," translated by a University of Alabama professor from a line in the poem "What Constitutes a State?" by the English scholar Sir William Jones.

What is on the Alabama state flag

The Alabama flag is a crimson cross of Saint Andrew on a plain white field. Nothing else. The 1895 act that created it is famously terse: it calls for a crimson diagonal cross running corner to corner on white, with the bars at least six inches broad. No seal, no lettering, no date, no fringe. The saltire is a stripped-down echo of the Confederate battle flag, and the bill was carried by a state representative and Confederate veteran, John W. A. Sanford Jr.

Because the statute never fixed the proportions of the field, Alabama's flag is legally ambiguous about whether it should be square or rectangular, and both have flown over the capitol in Montgomery. Florida adopted a similar red saltire on white five years later in 1900, adding its state seal in the middle, which is why visitors mix the two flags up constantly.

The state seal and coat of arms

Alabama's seal is a map, which makes it unusual. The original, adopted in 1817 while Alabama was still a territory and credited to Governor William Wyatt Bibb, shows the state and its neighbors with the river system traced across it, because rivers were how cotton and people actually moved. In 1868 the Reconstruction legislature discarded it for a bald eagle perched above the words "Here We Rest." Marie Bankhead Owen, director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, campaigned for years to bring the map back, and in 1939 the legislature restored it.

Owen drove the state coat of arms through the same session. Its shield is quartered with the emblems of the five governments that have claimed Alabama: Spain, France, Great Britain, the Confederacy and the United States. Two bald eagles support the shield, and the crest is a model of the Badine, the ship that carried the French colonists who founded Mobile. The motto scroll runs beneath.

Symbols that surprise people

• The state fossil is a whale. Basilosaurus cetoides was a long, serpent-bodied marine mammal that swam over what is now Alabama roughly 34 million years ago. Its vertebrae still weather out of the chalk in Clarke and Choctaw counties.
• The state amphibian lives nowhere else on earth. The Red Hills salamander is confined to a narrow band of ravine forest in Alabama's Red Hills, making it one of the few state symbols that is a true endemic.
• Alabama has an official state spirit. Conecuh Ridge Whiskey, sold as Clyde May's, was named the state spirit in 2004, honoring a Bullock County distiller who served prison time for making it.
• There is a state horse. The racking horse, a single-foot gaited breed, was adopted in 1975, and its national association is headquartered in Decatur.
• The state insect and the state butterfly are different animals. The monarch is the insect; the eastern tiger swallowtail holds a separate title as state butterfly and mascot. Both were named in 1989.

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