OHOhio State Symbols

Ohio's official symbols

Ohio owns the one state flag nobody confuses with another. It is a burgee, a swallowtail pennant with a triangular notch cut from the fly, and it is the only state flag in the country that is not a rectangle. Behind it sits a set of symbols with unusually specific origins: a carnation chosen because a president wore one on his lapel, a beverage picked to honour a tomato breeder, and a rock song adopted by the legislature.

What is on the Ohio state flag

The flag has five stripes, three red and two white, running the length of the banner, with a blue triangle at the hoist. Inside the triangle is a white circle with a red centre, ringed by seventeen white stars. The fly end is cut into a swallowtail.

Each element was assigned a meaning by its designer, the Cleveland architect John Eisenmann, who drew it for Ohio's pavilion at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. The triangles formed by the pennant shape stand for the state's hills and valleys. The stripes stand for its roads and waterways. Thirteen of the stars are grouped around the disc for the original colonies, and four more were added to the group on the fly side to make seventeen, because Ohio was the seventeenth state. The white circle with its red centre is meant to read both as the O of Ohio and as the nut of the buckeye tree. The legislature adopted the design in 1902, and in 2005 it went further and wrote an official folding procedure into law, one that ends after seventeen folds.

The great seal and the motto

The great seal shows a sunrise over Mount Logan, the ridge seen across the Scioto River from Adena, Thomas Worthington's estate near Chillicothe, where Ohio's first statehouse stood. In the foreground are a sheaf of wheat for the state's farms and a bundle of seventeen arrows, again for Ohio as the seventeenth state, with thirteen rays rising from the sun for the original colonies.

The motto has a stranger history. Ohio's first motto, Imperium in Imperio, was repealed in 1868, leaving the state with none for ninety-one years. The current line, With God, all things are possible, was adopted in 1959 after a Cincinnati schoolboy wrote to state officials suggesting the verse from the Gospel of Matthew. It survived a federal court challenge in the late 1990s over the establishment clause and remains in use.

Symbols that surprise people

• An official rock song. Hang On Sloopy, the 1965 hit by the Ohio band the McCoys and a fixture of Ohio State football, was made the state rock song in 1985.
• Tomato juice as the state drink. Adopted in 1965, it honours Alexander W. Livingston of Reynoldsburg, who bred the first commercially successful tomato varieties in the 1870s.
• Two fruits. Ohio names the tomato its state fruit and the pawpaw, a custard-textured native that grows along river bottoms, its state native fruit. Both were adopted in 2009.
• A carnation for a president. The scarlet carnation was adopted in 1904 in memory of William McKinley, who wore one in his buttonhole for luck and was assassinated in 1901.
• A two thousand year old pipe. The state artifact, named in 1998, is the Adena Pipe, a carved stone pipe in the shape of a man found in a burial mound near Chillicothe.

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