Flag of Tennessee

What the flag shows

• Three white stars. Five-pointed, for the state’s three grand divisions, East, Middle and West Tennessee, arranged so that none sits above the others.
• The blue circle. Edged in white, an unbroken ring binding the three divisions into one, which Reeves called “an indissoluble trinity.”
• The crimson field. The main color of the flag.
• The blue bar. At the fly end, set off by a narrow white stripe, added to break up the crimson so the flag does not look all red when it hangs limp.
• White edgings. Used to sharpen the contrast between the other colors.

The 1905 law sets the flag’s length at one and two-thirds times its width, with the blue disc half the flag’s width.

The forgotten first flag

Tennessee did have a flag before 1905. The General Assembly adopted a simple design ahead of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition in Nashville in 1897, but it was little used and largely forgotten afterward.

Captain Reeves’s design

LeRoy Reeves, a Johnson City lawyer and captain of Company F, Third Regiment, Tennessee Infantry, began campaigning for a new flag in 1903. The Legislature adopted his tri-star design on April 17, 1905, and his original template flag first flew at the Johnson City armory. For decades state officials made little use of it, and Reeves kept lobbying for the flag to fly over the Capitol until his death in 1960. He left his original flag to the Tennessee State Museum in his will, and the museum plans to display it when the new Capitol Visitors Center opens in 2027.

The tri-star emblem

The circle of three stars has a title of its own: a state law has made the “tristar,” the circular three-star design from the flag, an official state symbol.

Saluting the flag

Tennessee has two official salutes to its flag, both adopted in 2006: one by Lucy Steele Harrison, beginning “Three white stars on a field of blue,” and one by Miss John Bostick, beginning “Flag of Tennessee, I salute thee.”