Connecticut's flag asks you to read a 380-year-old metaphor. On an azure field, a white shield carries three grapevines, each with three bunches of purple grapes, over a ribbon reading "Qui Transtulit Sustinet": he who transplanted still sustains. The vines are the colonists, pulled up from England and set down in the Connecticut River valley, and the image has marked the place since the 1630s, long before there was a state to fly it. The flag itself is a late arrival, adopted in 1897 after a Daughters of the American Revolution chapter asked the legislature what, exactly, the state's flag was and discovered the answer was nothing.
A seal older than the colony's charter
The grapevines start with George Fenwick, one of the founders of Saybrook Colony at the mouth of the Connecticut River. Around 1639 Fenwick had a seal made for the colony showing a field of grapevines, fifteen of them, with a hand emerging from clouds and a scroll reading "Sustinet qui transtulit." The motto is usually traced to Psalm 80, in which God brings a vine out of Egypt, drives out the nations, and plants it. For English Puritans who had crossed an ocean to plant themselves in new ground, the verse was autobiography.
When Connecticut Colony bought out Saybrook in 1644, the seal came with the deal and became the colony's own. In October 1711 the governor and General Assembly simplified it, cutting the fifteen vines to three and settling the motto's word order into the modern "Qui Transtulit Sustinet." Three vines, three bunches each, has been the arrangement ever since, through colony, state, and the various redrawings of the arms.
What the three vines count is genuinely unsettled. One tradition says the three oldest towns, Windsor, Wethersfield, and Hartford, planted along the river in the 1630s. Another says the three colonies that merged to form Connecticut: Connecticut Colony, Saybrook, and New Haven. Both readings fit the history, the state has never ruled, and the ambiguity is now part of the design.
The DAR forces the question
For most of the nineteenth century Connecticut got along without an official flag. Militia and Civil War regiments carried versions of the state arms on blue, and most people assumed something official existed. In 1895 the Anna Warner Bailey chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Groton, wanting a state flag for its hall, went looking for the specification and found there was none to follow.
The chapter sent a memorial to the state, and on May 29, 1895, Governor Owen Vincent Coffin put the adoption of an official flag before the General Assembly. The design submitted by Abby Day Slocomb, the chapter's regent, followed the familiar regimental pattern: the grapevine shield on an azure field. The General Assembly approved it in 1897, and the law fixed the flag Connecticut still flies. Coffin's term had ended by then, which makes the flag one of his stranger legacies: proposed by one administration, adopted under the next, unchanged since.
A statute with strange numbers
The adopting statute is specific in an unhelpful way. It sets the flag's dimensions at five feet six inches in length and four feet four inches in width, a squat rectangle of roughly 33:26 that corresponds to no standard flag format before or since. Nobody has documented why those numbers were chosen. The statute goes on in heraldic language: a shield of argent (white) charged with three grapevines, supported and bearing fruit proper, on a field of azure, with the motto on a white ribbon below.
In practice the odd ratio is mostly theoretical. Flag manufacturers produce Connecticut flags in the common 3:5 and 2:3 sizes, scaling the shield to fit, and the state does not appear to police the difference. The rococo ornamentation of the shield varies from maker to maker too, since the statute describes the elements rather than providing artwork. The result is a flag that is legally precise about its measurements and loose about nearly everything else.
The seal-on-blue problem
Vexillologists file Connecticut's flag under the most common American complaint: arms on a blue field, like roughly half the US states, distinguishable only up close. In the North American Vexillological Association's 2001 survey of 72 state and provincial flags, Connecticut placed 50th with 4.32 out of 10, in the crowded lower-middle band of blue-field flags between Illinois and West Virginia.
The ranking is fair as far as it goes; at flagpole distance, Connecticut's flag reads as "blue with a white blob," and the motto is illegible past a few yards. But the flag has a better claim to its imagery than most of its blue-field neighbors. The grapevines are not a committee's allegory from the 1890s. They are a working symbol with a continuous 380-year history, older than the state, older than the United States, and specific enough that no other flag on earth could be mistaken for it once you are close enough to see the grapes. Redesign proposals surface occasionally, as they do everywhere, and have found little traction. The vines, having been transplanted once, have stayed put.
References
[1] "Flag of Connecticut," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Connecticut
[2] "The State Flag," State of Connecticut. https://portal.ct.gov/about/state-symbols/the-state-flag
[3] "Connecticut's Official State Flag: Who Knew?" Connecticut History, CT Humanities. https://connecticuthistory.org/connecticuts-official-state-flag-who-knew/
[4] "Sites, Seals, Symbols," Connecticut State Register and Manual, Secretary of the State. https://portal.ct.gov/sots/register-manual/section-x/sites-seals-symbols
[5] "Flag of Connecticut," Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/flag-of-Connecticut
[6] Ted Kaye, "The American State/Provincial Flag Survey," Raven: A Journal of Vexillology, Vol. 8 (2001), NAVA.