State symbols of all 50 states

Five that every state has

All 50 states have a flag, a seal, a bird, a flower and a tree. The seals are by far the oldest. Eight of the original thirteen states adopted the seals they still use between 1776 and 1799, and Rhode Island’s anchor dates to 1664, when it was still a colony. Flags came much later, and they are still changing: Minnesota and Utah both adopted new ones in 2024.

The living symbols came in waves. State flowers came first, in the 1890s, partly so states would have a flower to show at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago; Vermont was the first to put one into law, the red clover in 1894. State birds followed in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, usually after campaigns by Audubon societies, women’s clubs and votes by schoolchildren; Kentucky led the way with the cardinal in 1926. State trees mostly date from the 1930s to the 1950s, although Texas named the pecan as early as 1919.

The boom since the 1970s

Until about 1960 a state might have a handful of symbols. Then the pace changed. The states made 60 new designations in the 1950s, 94 in the 1960s and 265 in the 2000s, and the 2020s are on course to pass that. Fish, fossils and insects are now nearly universal: 47 states have a state fish, and 43 each have a fossil and an insect. The 50 states use more than 500 different titles in all, and about three in four of them are claimed by only one state, from Missouri’s official barbecue capital to Massachusetts’s official children’s book.

Some choices spread through national campaigns. Square dance clubs asked one legislature after another to adopt the square dance, starting with Oregon in 1977, and pushed harder after a bid to make it the national folk dance failed in 1988; today 21 states have it. Milk is the official drink of 20 states, 14 of them named between 1981 and 1988, usually in support of the dairy industry. Soil scientists led the campaigns for many of the 22 state soils, and Scottish heritage groups for many of the 22 state tartans.

Made in the classroom

A remarkable share of symbols come from schoolchildren. At least 124 designations in our records, in 38 states, trace back to a class project or a student vote, and a symbol bill makes a hands-on lesson in how laws are made. In New Hampshire, a state senator who visited a fourth-grade class to talk about government came away with a petition for a state marsupial, the Virginia opossum.

The campaigns can take years. In 1974 second-grade classes in Delaware and Massachusetts each won a state insect, the ladybug. New Hampshire fifth graders followed in 1977, after a House committee tried to replace their ladybug bill with a State Insect Selection Board and the full House reversed it, 185 to 135. Ninety-seven New Jersey pupils lobbied for four years before Hadrosaurus became the state dinosaur in 1991. In Alaska, a statewide student vote picked the four-spot skimmer dragonfly over the mosquito by 879 votes.

Children’s bills can turn into bargains. When Massachusetts third graders proposed Make Way for Ducklings as the state children’s book, Springfield legislators wanted a Dr. Seuss book instead. The compromise named both an official children’s book and an official children’s author and illustrator, and a state donut as well.

New kinds of symbol

Each decade brings categories no one had thought of before. New Jersey’s Hadrosaurus was the first state dinosaur, in 1991, and 15 states now have one; a third of them, from Utah’s Utahraptor to California’s Augustynolophus, were named in 2017 and 2018 alone. Utah made the M1911 pistol the first official state firearm in 2011, Arizona followed weeks later with the Colt Single Action Army revolver, and 11 states have one today. Minnesota named the first state mushroom, the morel, in 1984; ten states now have one, seven of them named since 2023.

The smallest symbols are microbes. Oregon honored brewer’s yeast in 2013, New Jersey the soil bacterium that gave the world streptomycin in 2019, and Illinois the strain of penicillin mold, found on a moldy cantaloupe in Peoria, that made mass production of the drug possible. Six states, starting with Tennessee in 2014, have named shelter or rescue animals as their state pet to encourage adoption.

How a symbol becomes official

Most symbols are created by statute: a legislator files a bill, it passes both chambers and the governor signs it. Texas and West Virginia often use resolutions instead. A few came from the executive branch: Colorado’s governor named Stegosaurus the state fossil by executive order in 1982, after a fourth-grade class had campaigned for two years. Wyoming’s law does not name its dinosaur at all; it says the dinosaur is chosen by election, and the Secretary of State lists the winner, Triceratops.

Symbols can also be replaced. Utah swapped the Colorado blue spruce for the quaking aspen in 2014, Texas replaced its state dinosaur in 2009 when the fossils were reidentified as a new species, and Kentucky’s state tree changed from the Kentucky coffeetree to the tulip poplar in 1994.

Find a state’s symbols

The table below lists how many designations each state has, with the oldest and the most recent. Each state’s page lists every symbol with the year it was adopted, the law that made it official and the story behind it.