KSKansas State Symbols

Kansas is identified worldwide by one plant. The wild native sunflower, Helianthus annuus, became the official floral emblem in 1903, and the legislature chose it because it grows without cultivation along nearly every roadside, fence line and section road in the state. The nickname followed the flower rather than the reverse, and the same bloom sits at the top of the state flag as a crest above the seal. Kansas has since added symbols that reach from the Cretaceous seabed under its western chalk beds to the tallgrass prairie in the Flint Hills.

Official state symbols

What is on the Kansas state flag

The Kansas flag is a dark blue rectangle carrying the full state seal in the center. Above the seal sits a sunflower resting on a twisted bar of gold and light blue. That bar is the heraldic device for the Louisiana Purchase, the 1803 land transfer that brought most of present-day Kansas under United States control, and the sunflower above it is the state flower serving as a crest.

The word KANSAS appears in gold block letters below the seal. It was not on the original design. Kansas adopted a state banner in 1925, a sunflower on a blue field hung from a horizontal bar, and it was awkward to carry in parades alongside other state flags. The legislature replaced it with the current flag in 1927, then added the state name in 1961 so the flag could be identified at a distance without reading the tiny seal.

The state seal and what its pictures mean

The seal was adopted in 1861, the year Kansas entered the Union, and it reads as a single landscape rather than a set of emblems. A sun rises in the east. A river carries a steamboat, standing for commerce. In the foreground a settler plows beside a log cabin, standing for agriculture. Behind him an ox-drawn wagon train moves west. Further back, mounted hunters pursue a herd of bison. Thirty-four stars arch across the top because Kansas was the thirty-fourth state, and the motto Ad astra per aspera runs on a ribbon beneath them.

The motto is the part people ask about most. It translates as "to the stars through difficulties," and it was chosen in 1861 by legislators who had just lived through Bleeding Kansas, the years of armed conflict between free-state and pro-slavery settlers that preceded statehood. The difficulties in the phrase were not metaphorical.

Symbols that surprise people

• Two state fossils, one from the sky and one from the sea. In 2014 Kansas named Pteranodon its state flight fossil and Tylosaurus its state marine fossil. Both come from the Smoky Hill Chalk of western Kansas, deposited when the Western Interior Seaway covered the state.
• The state gemstone is fossilized tree resin. Jelinite amber, adopted in 2018, is found in Cretaceous sandstone along the Smoky Hill River in Ellsworth County and almost nowhere else.
• Schoolchildren picked the state reptile. The ornate box turtle became official in 1986 after a campaign by elementary students in Caldwell, who lobbied the legislature directly.
• The state song was written in a dugout cabin. Brewster Higley wrote the lyrics of "Home on the Range" on Beaver Creek in Smith County around 1872, and Daniel Kelley set them to music. Kansas made it the state song in 1947.
• Kansas has an official dirt. Harney silt loam, a deep wind-blown loess soil found across central Kansas, was designated the state soil in 1990.

Neighboring states and more Kansas pages