IAIowa State Symbols

Iowa is the Hawkeye State because two men from Burlington decided it should be. Judge David Rorer and newspaper editor James G. Edwards began promoting the name in 1838, borrowing the scout Hawkeye from James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans and tying it to the memory of Sauk leader Black Hawk. Iowa keeps a notably short list of official symbols compared with its neighbours, and the ones it has lean hard on the two rivers that form its borders and on the prairie between them.

Official state symbols

What is on the Iowa state flag

Three vertical bars, blue at the hoist, white in the centre, red at the fly, give the flag the shape of a French tricolour. That is deliberate. Iowa came into the United States through the Louisiana Purchase, and the designer wanted the flag to record the French claim on the territory. The blue bar stands for loyalty, justice and truth, the white for purity, and the red for courage.

On the white centre bar a bald eagle carries blue streamers in its beak bearing the state motto in white letters, "Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain". The word "IOWA" is stitched in red below the streamers. Dixie Cornell Gebhardt of Knoxville designed it for the Daughters of the American Revolution during the First World War, when Iowa National Guard units in France had no state colours to fly. The General Assembly adopted it in March 1921.

The state seal and its lead furnace

Iowa's seal was written into law in 1847, a year after statehood, and the legislature described it in unusual detail. A citizen soldier stands in a wheat field holding a US flag in one hand and a liberty cap on a staff in the other. Around him lie a plough, a pitchfork, a sickle and a rake. Behind him sits a lead furnace with a pile of pig lead, a direct reference to the Dubuque mines that drew the first waves of settlers into eastern Iowa.

The Mississippi River runs across the background with the steamboat Iowa on it, tying the young state to the river traffic that carried its grain to market. A bald eagle flies above, holding in its beak the scroll with the motto. The soldier is the point of the composition: Iowa entered the Union as a free state during the argument over slavery in the territories, and the seal shows an armed farmer rather than a figure of allegory.

Symbols that surprise people

• The state tree is not a species. Iowa named simply "the oak" in 1961 rather than pick one of the dozen or so oaks native to the state.
• The state song borrows a Christmas carol. S.H.M. Byers wrote the words to the tune of O Tannenbaum. He had heard the melody while held in a Confederate prison at Columbia, South Carolina.
• The state rock is hollow. Geodes were adopted in 1967 for the crystal lined nodules that weather out of the limestone around Keokuk in the far southeast corner, where Geode State Park is named for them.
• The state flower was chosen for a battleship. The wild prairie rose was picked in 1897 because it decorated the silver service Iowa presented to the USS Iowa.
• The state has an official soil. Tama silty clay loam, a deep black prairie soil, represents the ground that makes Iowa one of the two leading corn producing states.

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