VTVermont State Symbols

The sugar maple is the symbol Vermont trades on, and the state named it official in 1949 for reasons that are commercial as much as sentimental: Vermont produces more maple syrup than any other state, and the tree also delivers the October color that fills the inns. Almost every other Vermont symbol points at the same two things, the forest and the dairy farm. Even the nickname is topographic. Vermont comes from the French words for green mountain, and the Green Mountains run the full length of the state like a spine.

Official state symbols

The Latin motto is the more interesting of the two. Stella quarta decima fulgeat translates as "may the fourteenth star shine bright," a phrase Vermont used on early coinage and militia buttons because it was the fourteenth state, the first admitted after the original thirteen. The legislature made it an official second motto in 2015. The Morgan horse is a Vermont invention as well, descended from a single stallion owned by Justin Morgan of Randolph in the 1790s.

What is on the Vermont state flag

The flag, adopted in 1923, is a blue field carrying the state coat of arms. A tall pine tree stands at the center for Vermont's forests. Behind it rise the Green Mountains, painted with a strip of blue sky above. A red cow stands to the left of the tree and three sheaves of wheat to the right, the dairy and the grain harvest side by side. A buck's head sits above the shield as the crest, pine boughs cross behind it, and a scroll along the bottom carries the word "Vermont" and the motto "Freedom and Unity." Vermont went through two earlier flags before this one. The 1804 version used seventeen stars and stripes, and an 1837 design placed the coat of arms on a striped field, which made it easy to confuse with the national flag at a distance.

The state seal and its fourteen branches

Ira Allen designed Vermont's Great Seal in 1778, which makes it one of the oldest state seals still in use and one of the very few that has never been substantially redrawn. It is a landscape read left to right: a large pine tree in the center with fourteen branches, wavy lines above and below for sky and water, a cow and sheaves of wheat for agriculture, and forested hills across the background. The fourteen branches carry the same message as the Latin motto, marking Vermont as the fourteenth state.

Symbols that surprise people

• The state pie comes with serving instructions. When Vermont named apple pie official in 1999, the law recommended a "good faith effort" to serve it with cold milk, a slice of cheddar weighing at least two ounces, or a large scoop of vanilla ice cream.
• Vermont has two state fossils. The Charlotte whale, a beluga skeleton dug out of clay in 1849 far from any ocean, is the state marine fossil, and the Mount Holly mammoth was added in 2014 as the state terrestrial fossil.
• Three rocks are official, not one: granite, marble and slate, each tied to a quarrying region of the state.
• Milk is the official state beverage, adopted in 1983, and maple is the official state flavor.
• The state soil is the Tunbridge series, the stony upland soil that most of Vermont's sugarbushes and hill farms sit on.

Neighbouring states' symbols

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