ILIllinois State Symbols

Land of Lincoln is the phrase almost everyone associates with Illinois, and it is a real designation: the state registered it as the official slogan in 1955 and it has been stamped on licence plates ever since. The older nickname, the Prairie State, describes the tallgrass that once covered about 60 percent of the land and survives now mainly in the state prairie grass, big bluestem. Schoolchildren picked a striking number of the rest, including the cardinal, the violet, the white oak and the white-tailed deer.

Official state symbols

What is on the Illinois state flag

The flag is a white field carrying the central emblem of the state seal. A bald eagle stands on a boulder holding a red banner in its beak with the motto "State sovereignty, national union", and clutches a shield of thirteen stars and stripes for the original colonies. Two dates are cut into the boulder: 1818, the year Illinois entered the Union, and 1868, the year the current seal was drawn. Behind the eagle the sun rises over prairie ground and water.

The design came from a 1915 contest run by the Daughters of the American Revolution and won by Lucy Derwent of Rockford. For fifty five years the flag carried no lettering to identify it. Chief Petty Officer Bruce McDaniel, an Illinois sailor serving in Vietnam, found that nobody recognised the banner and campaigned to have the state name added. The revised flag with "ILLINOIS" spelled out beneath the eagle took effect on 1 July 1970.

The upside down words on the state seal

The seal Illinois uses today was redrawn in 1868 under Secretary of State Sharon Tyndale, three years after the Civil War ended. Tyndale wanted the motto reversed to read "National union, state sovereignty", which suited the mood of a state that had just supplied the Union with Lincoln and Grant. The legislature refused to change the wording that had stood since 1819.

The compromise is still visible. On the ribbon in the eagle's beak the banner twists so that the words "State sovereignty" appear upside down while "national union" reads the right way up. The order of the words was preserved and the emphasis quietly reversed. The rest of the seal is straightforward symbolism: the eagle for the nation, the shield for the thirteen colonies, the rising sun for a young state, and the boulder for permanence.

Symbols that surprise people

• The state fossil exists nowhere else. The Tully monster, adopted in 1989, is known only from the Mazon Creek beds in northeastern Illinois, and palaeontologists still argue about what kind of animal it was.
• Illinois has an official pie. Pumpkin pie was named in 2015 because the state grows most of the pumpkins canned in the United States, nearly all of them around Morton in Tazewell County.
• Popcorn is the official state snack food. Elementary school students in Joliet drafted the bill and pushed the 2003 designation through the legislature.
• The state mineral is a fluorescent one. Fluorite, made official in 1965, was mined heavily in Hardin and Pope counties, which once supplied the bulk of American production.
• The tree took two votes. Schoolchildren picked the "native oak" in 1908, and the vagueness bothered enough people that another student vote in 1973 narrowed it to the white oak.

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