WIWisconsin State Symbols

The badger is the symbol everybody knows, and almost everybody gets the reason wrong. It is not there because badgers are common in Wisconsin. It is there because of the lead miners who worked the diggings around Mineral Point and Platteville in the 1820s and 1830s and who, rather than build cabins before winter, burrowed into the hillsides and slept in the workings. Locals called them badgers, the name stuck to the territory, and the animal followed the nickname rather than the other way round. A badger sits on top of the shield on the state coat of arms and so appears on the flag, and it was formally named the state animal in 1957.

Official state symbols

The bird, flower and tree were all signed into law on the same day in 1949, decades after schoolchildren had actually chosen them. Pupils picked the violet on Arbor Day in 1909 and the robin in a statewide ballot in the mid-1920s, and the legislature simply ratified the results.

What is on the Wisconsin state flag

A dark blue field carrying the state coat of arms, with the word WISCONSIN above it and the year 1848 below. Those two labels are recent: they were added in a 1979 act that took effect in 1981, because Wisconsin's flag was otherwise almost indistinguishable from the dozen other blue flags carrying a seal. The arms themselves are dense. A sailor with a coil of rope and a yeoman with a pick stand either side of a shield quartered into a plough for agriculture, a crossed pick and shovel for mining, an arm and hammer for manufacturing, and an anchor for navigation. In the centre of the shield sits a small United States shield with the motto E Pluribus Unum, a declaration of loyalty to the Union. The badger rests on top, and beneath the shield lie a cornucopia and a stack of thirteen lead ingots, standing for Wisconsin's mineral wealth and the thirteen original states.

Forward, and where the motto came from

Wisconsin's motto is a single word, which makes it one of the shortest in the country. The story attached to it is specific: in 1851 Governor Nelson Dewey wanted the seal redesigned and ran into Edward Ryan, a Milwaukee lawyer who later became chief justice of the state supreme court, on a New York street. The two of them worked out the arrangement on the spot and Ryan wrote "Forward" across the top. It has stayed there through every revision since. The word is also the name of the bronze statue that has stood at the Wisconsin State Capitol since 1895, sculpted by Jean Pond Miner, and the original now sits in the Wisconsin Historical Society while a replica holds the outdoor spot.

Symbols that surprise people

• Wisconsin is the only state with an official microbe. Lactococcus lactis, the bacterium used to make cheddar, colby and monterey jack, was designated in 2010.
• The state dance is the polka, adopted in 1993 on the strength of the state's Polish, German and Czech communities.
• There is an official state pastry. The kringle, an oval Danish pastry made in Racine since the 1880s, was named in 2013.
• Three separate animals hold official status. The badger is the state animal, the white-tailed deer is the state wildlife animal, and the dairy cow is the state domestic animal.
• The state song began as a football fight song. "On, Wisconsin!" was written in 1909 for the University of Wisconsin team, and new lyrics were fitted to the same tune before the legislature adopted it in 1959.
• Antigo silt loam exists nowhere else. The state soil, adopted in 1983, is found only in a band of north-central Wisconsin.

Neighbouring states' symbols

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