NVNevada State Symbols

Nevada's flag carries a phrase no other state flag has: Battle Born. Congress admitted Nevada on 31 October 1864, eight days before the presidential election, because Republicans wanted its votes and its support for the Thirteenth Amendment. There was no time to mail the state constitution to Washington, so Carson City telegraphed the entire document, more than sixteen thousand words, at a cost of roughly $3,400. The rush is written into the state's identity, and onto its flag.

Official state symbols

What is on the Nevada state flag

The field is cobalt blue. In the upper hoist corner sits a silver five-pointed star. Directly below the star is the word Nevada, and directly above it a golden scroll reading Battle Born. Two sprays of sagebrush, the state flower, cross beneath the star to form a half wreath. Silver for the Comstock Lode, sagebrush for the high desert, the scroll for Civil War statehood.

The design came out of a public contest held in 1926 and was adopted in 1929, credited to Louis Shellback III. The original statute scattered the letters N, E, V, A, D and A individually around the star among the sagebrush leaves, which flag makers largely ignored as unworkable. In 1991 the legislature rewrote the law to place the word in a single line below the star, formalising what manufacturers had been producing for sixty years.

The state seal and the mining economy it froze in place

Nevada's seal dates to 1866, two years after statehood. The foreground shows a quartz mill and a miner with an ore car, the machinery of hard-rock silver extraction rather than placer panning. Beside it are a plow, a sheaf of wheat and a sickle for agriculture. In the middle distance a train crosses a trestle bridge and a telegraph line runs alongside it, with the sun rising over the snow-covered Sierra Nevada behind. Thirty-six stars ring the outer border, because Nevada was the thirty-sixth state, and the motto All for Our Country runs beneath them.

Symbols that surprise people

• The state fossil is a marine reptile. Shonisaurus popularis, adopted in 1977, was an ichthyosaur that grew past fifteen metres. Its remains sit in the Nevada desert at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park, from a period when the ground was ocean floor.
• Nevada has an official state artifact. The tule duck decoy, named in 1995, refers to bulrush decoys recovered from Lovelock Cave that are roughly two thousand years old.
• Two state trees. The single-leaf pinyon was designated in 1953, and the bristlecone pine was added in 1987 rather than substituted, so both hold the title.
• Three separate mineral categories. Silver is the state metal, Virgin Valley black fire opal is the precious gemstone, Nevada turquoise is the semiprecious gemstone, and sandstone is the state rock.
• The state flower is a shrub. Sagebrush, adopted in 1917, is the plant that covers most of the Great Basin, and it appears on the flag as the wreath around the star.

Nearby state symbols

More about Nevada