Minnesota and Utah Both Replaced Their Flags in 2024. Only Utah Kept the Old One Flying.
Julio Song · · 9 min read
Two American states dropped their old flags within nine weeks of each other in 2024. Utah's new flag took effect on March 9. Minnesota's went up at sunrise on May 11. Both states were replacing the same kind of flag: a state seal sitting on a blue field.
Both ran public contests that drew thousands of entries, and both ended up with clean, simple designs.
They split on one decision. Utah kept its old flag as an official flag and ordered it flown at the Capitol at all times. Minnesota retired its old flag and handed it to the state historical society. Two years later, Minnesota's new flag has a political fight on its hands, and a dozen local governments still fly the old one.
The flag a farmer plowed across
Minnesota's first state flag came out of a design contest. According to the Wikipedia history of the flag, Minneapolis artist Amelia Hyde Center won with a design the legislature adopted on April 4, 1893. Sisters Pauline and Thomane Fjelde embroidered the first one in silk for the Chicago World's Fair, where it won a gold medal for embroidery.
The flag was revised in 1957 and again in 1983, but the core stayed the same. The state seal sat in the middle of a blue field. The seal showed a farmer plowing a field, his rifle leaning against a tree, while a Native American man rode a horse toward the sun. Critics read the scene as a picture of a people being driven out.
That was the political case for change. The design case was simpler. Andrew Prekker, the man whose entry became the new flag, told MPR News the old one was hard to tell apart from about ten other Midwestern state flags. Picture a row of blue flags with round seals in the middle, seen from a parking lot. Which one is Minnesota's?
How 2,128 drawings became one
The 2023 legislature created the State Emblems Redesign Commission and gave it a deadline. Its report to the legislature lays out the timeline.
- The commission first met on September 5, 2023.
- Public submissions opened on October 2 and closed on October 30, with 2,128 flag designs and 399 seal designs received.
- On November 21, commissioners narrowed the field to six flag finalists.
- On December 9 and 10, the six finalists hung as full-size fabric flags at the Mall of America for shoppers to inspect.
- On December 15, the commission picked one concept. On December 19, it adopted the final version.
That is under four months from first meeting to finished flag. The same report says the public left more than 21,882 comments along the way. Ted Kaye of the North American Vexillological Association briefed the commission on the principles of good flag design at its October 31 meeting.
The case study: what a 24-year-old drew, and what the state kept
Prekker was 24 years old and lived in Luverne, Minnesota. He had no formal design background. His entry, number 1953, put an abstract outline of Minnesota at the hoist with a white North Star inside it. To the right ran three bands: white for snow, green for agriculture and nature, light blue for water. He cited the flags of Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and Colorado as models of simple, memorable design.
The commission kept the outline and the star. It cut the stripes. The Minnesota Secretary of State's page says the design swapped his stylized North Star for an eight-point star and removed the three bars on the right. What's left is two blues and a star.
Each piece carries a defined meaning, per the commission's report:
- The dark blue panel, Pantone 648, stands for the night sky. Its shape is the outline of the state.
- The light blue field, Pantone 305, stands for water. The report counts 11,842 lakes and 6,564 rivers and streams.
- The white star is the North Star of the state motto, "L'Étoile du Nord."
The star's eight points have a source in the building where the law gets made. The report says the State Capitol Rotunda floor carries a brass eight-point star designed by architect Cass Gilbert. The flag's star is oriented to match it, so one point aims north in both places. The report also ties the eight-point star to quilting traditions among Indigenous people and some newer immigrant communities.
On paper, this is a textbook success. A young amateur with a sketch beat out 2,127 rivals, and professionals refined his idea instead of replacing it.
Utah took the long road
Utah started its process earlier and moved slower. The state's old flag had its own messy history. The Deseret News traces it to a 1903 banner made for a World's Fair parade. The legislature adopted an official version in 1911. A 1913 battleship flag that ignored the statute became official anyway, and a 1922 sewing error, copied from a typo in the state's printed laws, put the date "1847" in the wrong spot until 2011.
A state task force reviewed 5,703 submissions, according to the same Deseret News report. The finished design has a dark blue top edged with five white mountain peaks, a white middle, a red base, and a gold beehive in a blue hexagon. Utah's official symbolism page says the beehive stands for the state slogan "Industry," the red for the southern canyons, and the five-pointed star for 1896, the year Utah joined the Union as the 45th state.
The bill, SB 31, was not a landslide. KSL reported that it passed the House 40 to 35 and the Senate 19 to 9. Governor Spencer Cox signed it on March 21, 2023, with nearly a year before the flag took effect on March 9, 2024.
The spare flag in the closet
On the day he signed SB 31, Cox also issued an executive order. Per KSL, it requires the historic flag to fly at the Utah Capitol at all times, and at all state buildings on state holidays and special occasions. The Deseret News confirms the historic flag stays an official state flag, and in some situations it takes precedence over the new one.
So no Utahn had to give anything up. If you liked the old flag, you kept it, with the state's blessing. Opponents still pushed back. A referendum drive needed 134,298 signatures to put the change to voters, and it fell short. But nobody who loved the old flag had to watch it disappear.
Minnesota went the other way. On May 11, 2024, the Minnesota National Guard retired the outgoing flags before the new one went up at sunrise. The Minnesota Historical Society took the flag that had flown over the Capitol and said it had no plans to display it. The state's flag law now points to one design, the one "certified in the report of the State Emblems Redesign Commission." The old flag has no official role left.
Two years later, the old flag won't come down
A June 2026 Minnesota Poll by the Star Tribune, KARE 11 and the Hubbard School of Journalism surveyed 800 likely voters. It found about a third approve of the new flag and about half oppose it, with around 20% unsure. The split runs along party lines. Republicans disapproved by 90% to 2%. Even in Hennepin and Ramsey counties, home to Minneapolis and St. Paul, the flag lacked majority support.
Local governments have acted on that mood. By March 2026, a dozen cities and counties had kept or gone back to the old design, including Elk River, Detroit Lakes, Champlin, Zumbrota and Crow Wing County. The poll report notes the State Capitol is the only building the law requires to fly the state flag, so a city council is free to fly the 1983 version from its own pole.
The complaints follow a pattern. Opponents say they were left out of the process. Some say the new flag looks too much like Somalia's, which pairs light blue with a single white star.
Kaye, the vexillologist who briefed the commission, has an answer to that. In the same March 2026 report, he points out that similar colors are common and says, "That doesn't mean there's any connection." He also says the flag has become "simply a tool in the current political friction between the two parties."
What the comparison tells you
It would be easy to say Utah's executive order saved its flag. The evidence doesn't go that far. Utah's referendum drive still ran, and the state's politics differ from Minnesota's in ways no flag explains.
Still, if you ever sit on a flag committee for a city, a school or a state, the contrast is worth keeping in mind.
Start with speed. Minnesota went from first meeting to final design in about fifteen weeks, while Utah's process ran from a 2021 task force bill to a 2023 vote. The fast version produced a strong design. It also handed opponents an easy line, that nobody asked them.
Then there's the old flag's fan base. People attach memories to a flag that critics find ugly or offensive, and retiring it outright gives those people a grievance with a date on it. Utah gave its historic flag a job. Minnesota gave its own to an archive, and the Elk River city council found it a job anyway.
None of this is a verdict on the design. Prekker's flag flies over the Capitol in St. Paul, and NAVA told the commission it ranks among the best in the country. Minnesota's fight is about the flag it replaced. Utah never had that fight, because it let both flags fly at once.
Julio Song
Writer
Julio is a staff writer at FlagDB. He studied Mathematics at the University of Madrid and has a passion for vexillology.
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