NJNew Jersey State Symbols

The Garden State nickname traces to a single speech. Abraham Browning of Camden, addressing New Jersey Day at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, described the state as an immense barrel filled with good things to eat and open at both ends, with Pennsylvanians grabbing from one end and New Yorkers from the other. It stuck as folklore for seventy-eight years before it became official. When a 1954 bill put "Garden State" on licence plates, Governor Robert Meyner vetoed it, arguing the phrase had no official standing. The legislature overrode him.

Official state symbols

What is on the New Jersey state flag

The field is buff, a pale yellowish tan, with the state coat of arms in the centre. The colour is a direct quotation from the Continental Army. In 1779 George Washington ordered New Jersey's regiments to wear dark blue coats faced with buff, and the state took those two colours as its own. Buff and Jersey blue were later designated the official state colours. The flag itself was adopted in 1896.

The coat of arms carries a shield bearing three plows for agriculture. Above it a helmet is topped by a horse's head, which is also the source of the state animal. Two female figures support the shield: Liberty on the left, holding a staff topped with a liberty cap, and Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, on the right, holding an overflowing cornucopia. A scroll below reads Liberty and Prosperity with the year 1776.

The seal, drawn in 1777

New Jersey's great seal was designed by Pierre Eugene du Simitiere, a Swiss-born artist in Philadelphia who also worked on early designs for the Great Seal of the United States, and the legislature adopted it in 1777, while the state was still a battleground. The design has stayed remarkably stable. New Jersey is one of the few states whose flag simply reproduces its arms rather than adding a name, a star or a date, which is why the buff background does most of the identifying work.

Symbols that surprise people

• New Jersey has an official state microbe. Streptomyces griseus, a soil bacterium, was adopted in 2019. Selman Waksman's laboratory at Rutgers isolated streptomycin from it in 1943, producing the first effective treatment for tuberculosis.
• The state dinosaur was the world's first good skeleton. Hadrosaurus foulkii, dug from a marl pit in Haddonfield in 1858, was the most complete dinosaur skeleton found anywhere at the time and the first mounted for public display. It became the state dinosaur in 1991.
• There is no state song. Repeated bills have failed, so New Jersey remains one of the very few states with no official song.
• The official state ship is an oyster schooner. The A. J. Meerwald, built in 1928 at Dorchester and restored as a sailing museum, was designated in 1998 for the Delaware Bay oyster fleet.
• The state dance is the square dance. Adopted in 1983, in the most densely populated state in the country.

Nearby state symbols

More about New Jersey