Flag of Minnesota

The first flags

Minnesota’s first official flag was made for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The Women’s Auxiliary Board chose a design by Amelia Hyde Center of Minneapolis from more than 200 entries, and Pauline and Thomane Fjelde stitched it in silk. It was white on the front and blue on the back, with gold fringe, and showed the state seal in a wreath of pink-and-white lady’s slippers with the motto and the dates 1819, 1858 and 1893. The legislature endorsed it on April 4, 1893.

The two-layer silk flag was expensive and fared badly in the wind. In 1957 Minnesota adopted a simpler, single-layer flag: a medium blue field carrying the seal, with nineteen gold stars marking Minnesota as the nineteenth state admitted after the original thirteen. A 1983 law revised the seal, adding Norway pines and turning the Native American rider to ride toward the settler rather than away from him.

Decades of criticism

The 1957 flag drew criticism almost from the start. A citizens’ “North Star” design was proposed in 1989. In 2001 the North American Vexillological Association ranked Minnesota’s flag among the ten worst state and provincial flags, and about ten bills to redesign it were introduced between 2000 and 2023. Critics said the flag was too complicated and too much like other blue seal flags, and many objected to the seal’s scene of a white settler plowing his field while a Native American rode off into the distance.

The 2023 commission

In 2023 the legislature created the State Emblems Redesign Commission, with 13 members, to choose a new flag and seal. It received 2,128 flag designs and 399 seal designs from the public. In December 2023 it chose a flag based on a concept by Andrew Prekker of Luverne, refined by the commission. The new flag became official on Statehood Day, May 11, 2024.

What the flag shows

• The dark blue shape. At the staff, a dark blue field shaped like a simplified outline of Minnesota, standing for the night sky.
• The North Star. A white eight-pointed star on the dark blue, with one point aimed north, for the state motto, L’Étoile du Nord, “The Star of the North.” The same eight-pointed star is set into the marble floor of the State Capitol’s rotunda, laid in 1905.
• The light blue field. Filling the rest of the flag, for Minnesota’s abundant waters.

The flag has no seal, lettering or dates.

Reaction and rules

The change was not universally popular. Some communities, including Plainview and Zumbrota, passed resolutions to fly only the old flag on city property; state law does not require cities or counties to fly the state flag. Under Minnesota law the state flag flies on the Capitol grounds from sunrise to sunset and is folded for storage the same way as the US flag.