WAWashington State Symbols

Washington's flag is the symbol that sets it apart from every other state, and it does so twice over. It is the only state flag with a green field, and the only one carrying the portrait of a US president. Washington is also the only state named for a president, so the face on the flag and the name on the map are the same man. The nickname comes from the same green: Seattle newspaperman Charles T. Conover proposed "the Evergreen State" around 1890, pointing at the fir and hemlock forests west of the Cascades. It caught on completely and appears on the licence plates, though the legislature never actually voted it into law.

Official state symbols

The motto sits slightly apart from the rest. Al-ki is Chinook Jargon, the trading language of the lower Columbia, and it appeared on the territorial seal. It is treated as the state motto by custom rather than by statute, and it does not appear on the modern seal at all.

What is on the Washington state flag

A dark green rectangle, the same green in the fly as in the hoist, with the state seal centred on it: a bust of George Washington in a gold ring, circled by the words "The Seal of the State of Washington 1889." An optional gold fringe runs around the edge. The legislature adopted it in 1923, the last of the 48 states then in the Union to settle on an official flag, and the Daughters of the American Revolution had lobbied for years to get it done. Green was chosen to match the nickname and the forests. Because the seal is printed in full colour on both sides, the Washington flag is one of the most expensive state flags to manufacture, and it is the only one that cannot simply be reversed.

How a jeweller drew the state seal in an afternoon

The seal came out of the 1889 constitutional convention. A committee had prepared an elaborate scene with Mount Rainier, a harbour, a wheat field and grazing sheep. Charles Talcott, an Olympia jeweller, argued it was far too fussy to be engraved or copied cleanly and that the design should be something nobody could get wrong. He drew two concentric circles using an ink bottle and a silver dollar, lettered the state name and the year between them, and pasted a portrait of George Washington cut from a postage stamp into the middle. The convention took his version. Talcott's brothers helped cut the die, and the family was paid a modest fee. In 1967 the state replaced the stamp portrait with one based on Gilbert Stuart's painting, but the layout is still Talcott's.

Symbols that surprise people

• The state folk song was written by Woody Guthrie. "Roll On, Columbia, Roll On" came out of a month Guthrie spent in 1941 writing songs for the Bonneville Power Administration, and the state adopted it in 1987.
• There is an official state vegetable, and it is an onion. The Walla Walla sweet onion was designated in 2007.
• Washington has an official state ship. The Lady Washington, a full-scale replica of an 18th-century brig homeported in Aberdeen, was named in 2007 and has appeared in feature films.
• The state fossil was pushed through by schoolchildren. Pupils from Windsor Elementary in Cheney campaigned for the Columbian mammoth and got it adopted in 1998.
• Palouse Falls is the official state waterfall, designated in 2014, a 198-foot drop cut by Ice Age floods in the scablands of eastern Washington.
• Two shellfish hold official status. The Olympia oyster, the only oyster native to the Northwest coast, was named state oyster in 2014.

Neighbouring and nearby states' symbols

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