CTConnecticut State Symbols

Connecticut's flag and seal both carry the same picture: three grapevines heavy with fruit. It illustrates the motto, Qui transtulit sustinet, "he who transplanted still sustains," a line the colony brought over on a seal in 1639 and has never let go of. Almost every other Connecticut symbol points at one specific place or person, from a white oak that hid a royal charter to a submarine launched at Groton.

Official state symbols

What is on the Connecticut state flag

The General Assembly adopted the flag in 1897. A white baroque shield sits on an azure field. On the shield are three grapevines, each bearing three bunches of purple grapes with green leaves, and below the shield a white streamer carries the motto in gold letters. The vines make the motto literal: people pulled up from England and replanted in the Connecticut valley, still bearing fruit. A second reading ties the three vines to the three river towns, Windsor, Wethersfield and Hartford, that combined to form the colony in 1639. Because the design, the shield's shape and the wording were all written into statute, Connecticut's flag has changed less over time than most state flags.

The seal and the Charter Oak

Colonel George Fenwick carried a seal to Saybrook Colony in 1639 showing fifteen grapevines and a hand reaching from a cloud with a scroll reading Sustinuit qui transtulit. When Saybrook merged into Connecticut the seal came along. In 1711 the design was cut to three vines and the hand was dropped, and the motto settled into the order used today. The 1784 version added the Latin legend Sigillum Reipublicae Connecticutensis in an oval border. The state tree has its own story attached: in 1687 colonists hid the colony's royal charter from Sir Edmund Andros inside a hollow white oak in Hartford. That tree fell in a storm in 1856, and the white oak became the state tree in 1947. Mountain laurel, the state flower since 1907, is the other piece of Connecticut greenery written into law, and it blooms pink and white across the Litchfield hills every June.

Connecticut's older nickname, the Nutmeg State, was never made official. It came from a jab at Yankee peddlers, who were said to whittle wooden nutmegs and sell them to buyers who could not tell the difference. It survives on storefronts and team names rather than in statute, while the Constitution State was the version the General Assembly settled on in 1959.

Symbols that surprise people

• The state animal is the sperm whale, adopted in 1975 to mark New London's whaling fleet, one of the busiest in the country in the 1840s.
• The state insect is the European praying mantis, an introduced species, picked in 1977 for the aphids and other pests it eats in Connecticut gardens.
• The state fossil is a footprint, not a bone. Eubrontes giganteus tracks were uncovered by a bulldozer in Rocky Hill in 1966 and are now enclosed at Dinosaur State Park.
• USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine, is the official state ship. She was built at Groton and launched in 1954.
• Connecticut names an official state hero and heroine: Nathan Hale, hanged as a spy in 1776, and Prudence Crandall, who opened a school for Black girls in Canterbury in 1833.

Neighboring states' symbols

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