DEDelaware State Symbols

The Blue Hen chicken is Delaware's strangest and most famous symbol, and it comes straight out of the Revolution. Soldiers in the Delaware regiment kept fighting gamecocks bred from a blue hen to pass time in camp, the birds had a reputation, and the name transferred to the men. It stuck to the state, to the University of Delaware's teams, and in 1939 to the statute book. Everything else on the list orbits two things: the date December 7, 1787, and the farm and river economy drawn onto a coat of arms in 1777.

Official state symbols

What is on the Delaware state flag

Adopted on July 24, 1913, the flag is a field of colonial blue with a buff diamond in the center. Those two colors were taken from the uniform George Washington wore, and Delaware troops served under him through the war. Inside the diamond sits the state coat of arms. Below the diamond, in blue on the buff ground, runs the date DECEMBER 7, 1787, the day Delaware became the first state to ratify the United States Constitution, which is where the nickname comes from. The diamond shape points at a second nickname, the Diamond State, which tradition credits to Thomas Jefferson calling Delaware a jewel among the states for its position on the seaboard.

The coat of arms, element by element

The arms were adopted in 1777 and they are farm inventory rendered in heraldry. The shield carries a sheaf of wheat for agriculture, an ear of corn for the same, and an ox standing on green ground for the importance of livestock. A wavy blue band across the middle is the Delaware River, the highway that carried the crops out. On the left stands a farmer with a hoe, on the right a militiaman with a musket, together standing for civil and military support of the state. Above the shield is a ship under sail, for the shipbuilding and coastal trade at Wilmington. The ribbon below reads Liberty and Independence, added in 1847 and borrowed from the Society of the Cincinnati.

Two of Delaware's plant symbols are older than they look. The peach blossom was adopted in 1895, when Delaware orchards carried hundreds of thousands of peach trees and the fruit was the leading cash crop in the state. American holly, adopted in 1939, stood behind a Christmas greenery trade that shipped wreaths and cut branches north out of Sussex County every December.

Symbols that surprise people

• Delaware has an official state star. In 2000 the legislature named a star in Ursa Major the Delaware Diamond.
• Milk became the official state beverage in 1983.
• The horseshoe crab is the state marine animal, adopted in 2002. Delaware Bay holds the largest spawning population in the world, and the shorebird migration that feeds on the eggs depends on it.
• The state fossil is a belemnite, the bullet-shaped internal shell of an extinct squid relative, found in the greensand of northern Delaware.
• Delaware designates both a state bug and a state butterfly: the ladybug, chosen in 1974 after a campaign by schoolchildren, and the tiger swallowtail in 1999.

Neighboring states' symbols

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