MIMichigan State Symbols

Michigan's best known symbol is a sentence, not an object. "Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice," if you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you, was written into the state seal in 1835 by Lewis Cass, two years before statehood, and it is still the only state motto that instructs the reader to look around. The rest of the list is geological and freshwater in a way no other state's is, from a fossil coral picked up on Lake Michigan beaches to a mastodon.

Official state symbols

What is on the Michigan state flag

Michigan's flag is a dark blue field carrying the full state coat of arms, and it is one of the busiest flags in the country. At the centre is a light blue shield showing a man standing on a peninsula, one hand raised in peace, a long gun in the other to show he is ready to defend the ground. The word "Tuebor," Latin for "I will defend," runs across the top of that shield. An elk stands on the left and a moose on the right as supporters, and a bald eagle sits above them holding an olive branch and three arrows, the national symbols of peace and war.

Three separate mottoes appear on one flag. "E Pluribus Unum" rides on the ribbon in the eagle's grasp, "Tuebor" sits on the shield, and the long peninsula motto runs on a scroll at the bottom. The current version was adopted in 1911, replacing earlier flags that had carried a portrait of the first governor on one side.

The seal and the Petoskey stone

Lewis Cass, the territorial governor, drew up the seal in 1835 and borrowed its structure from the arms of the Hudson's Bay Company, whose fur traders had worked the region for over a century. That is why a British-style heraldic layout of supporters, shield and crest ended up representing a Midwestern state.

The Petoskey stone, named state stone in 1965, is a piece of coral that lived in the warm shallow sea covering Michigan during the Devonian period, roughly 350 million years ago. Glaciers ground the colonies loose and scattered them along the northwest Lake Michigan shore, where the hexagonal cell pattern only appears once the stone is wet or polished. Collecting them near Petoskey is close to a state pastime, and the law limits how much a visitor can carry off state land.

Symbols that surprise people

• An official children's book. Michigan named "The Legend of Sleeping Bear," a retelling of the Ojibwe story behind the Sleeping Bear Dunes, in 1998.
• No official state insect. Michigan is one of the very few states without one. Bills backing several butterfly candidates have been introduced for decades and none has passed.
• A state soil. Kalkaska sand, adopted in 1990, is a sandy forest soil found in 29 counties and named after Kalkaska County.
• A gem found in one place. Isle Royale greenstone, the 1973 state gem, comes from lava flows on Isle Royale and the Keweenaw Peninsula and is protected on national park land.
• A mastodon fossil. The 2002 state fossil reflects more than 250 mastodon find sites recorded in Michigan, one of the densest concentrations in North America.

Symbols of nearby states

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