NENebraska State Symbols

Nebraska was the Tree Planters' State for fifty years before it was the Cornhusker State. The legislature adopted the first nickname in 1895, honouring J. Sterling Morton, who launched Arbor Day at Nebraska City in 1872 and turned tree planting into a civic duty on a treeless prairie. In 1945 lawmakers swapped it for Cornhusker State, borrowing the University of Nebraska athletic nickname that had itself come from the hand labour of stripping husks from corn.

Official state symbols

What is on the Nebraska state flag

The flag is the state seal rendered in gold and silver on a field of national blue. Nebraska adopted it in 1925 as the state banner and only redesignated it the state flag in 1963, which made it one of the last states to formally have one. Because the design is a seal on blue with no distinguishing shape or colour, it is close to unreadable at flag distance. In 2017 the flag flew upside down over the State Capitol in Lincoln for days before anyone in the building noticed, which vexillologists have quoted ever since as the strongest available argument for redesign.

The seal: a state describing its own future

The seal was adopted in 1867, the year Nebraska entered the Union. A blacksmith stands at an anvil with a raised hammer, representing the mechanic arts. Behind him are a settler's cabin, sheaves of cut wheat and stalks of growing corn. A steamboat climbs the Missouri River on one side, and a train runs west toward the Rocky Mountains on the other. The motto Equality before the law arches across the top on a banner.

Almost all of it was aspiration rather than record. The Union Pacific had begun laying track west from Omaha only in 1865, and the transcontinental line would not be joined until 1869, so the train on the seal was a promise. The motto is unusual among state mottoes for stating a legal principle rather than a virtue or a boast, and Nebraska put it in place while the Fourteenth Amendment was still being ratified.

Symbols that surprise people

• Kool-Aid is the official state soft drink. Adopted in 1998, it honours Edwin Perkins, who invented the powdered drink in Hastings in 1927 by removing the liquid from a fruit syrup so it could be mailed cheaply.
• The state tree was replaced. The American elm held the title from 1937 until Dutch elm disease destroyed Nebraska's elms; the eastern cottonwood took over in 1972.
• The state fossil is a mammoth. Named in 1967, it points to Archie, the enormous Columbian mammoth mounted at the University of Nebraska State Museum in Lincoln.
• An official grass and an official soil. Little bluestem became the state grass in 1969, and Holdrege silt loam was designated the state soil in 1979.
• Two agates, two categories. Blue agate is the state gemstone and prairie agate is the state rock, both adopted in 1967.
• The state song was written by an immigrant. "Beautiful Nebraska" was composed by Jim Fras, a Russian-born musician who settled in Lincoln, with lyrics by Fras and Guy Miller. The legislature adopted it in 1967, Nebraska's centennial year, alongside the gemstone, rock and fossil.

Nearby state symbols

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