Indiana got its flag the way Chicago got its famous one: a 1917 design contest won by someone who understood that a flag is not a painting. Paul Hadley's torch and nineteen stars use two colors, no seal, and no motto, and the only words on it were added against the designer's plan by the legislature. Among the fifty state flags it is one of the few that vexillologists consistently exempt from their complaints about American state flag design.
A centennial contest
Indiana turned one hundred in December 1916, and the centennial commission wanted a flag for the occasion; the state had gone its first century without one. The Daughters of the American Revolution sponsored a competition, offering $100 for the winning design. More than 200 entries arrived. As the contest progressed, organizers urged contestants toward simplicity, asking for designs that could be recognized at a distance and reproduced small enough for a button, guidance that most state flags of the era conspicuously lacked.
The winner was Paul Hadley of Mooresville, a small town southwest of Indianapolis. Hadley, born in 1880, had studied art in Philadelphia and worked in stained glass and interior design before settling into a career as a watercolorist; he would later teach at the Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis from 1922 to 1933 and come to be called the dean of Hoosier watercolor painters. His flag entry showed the discipline of a designer who worked in leaded glass: a single gold torch on deep blue, six rays, and a constellation of stars, nothing else.
Torch and nineteen stars
The composition is a counting exercise disguised as an emblem. Thirteen stars in the outer circle are the original thirteen states. Five stars in an inner half-circle below the torch are the next five states admitted: Vermont, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, and Louisiana. The large star above the flame is Indiana itself, the nineteenth state, admitted December 11, 1816. The torch is liberty and enlightenment, and the six rays streaming from its flame carry that influence outward to the edges of the field.
The General Assembly adopted the design on May 31, 1917, with a single modification: the word "Indiana" in a crescent arc above the large star. Hadley had not included it, and the addition is the one element design critics reliably grumble about, on the standard principle that a good flag should not need its name written on it. The legislature's instinct was at least practical; a lone gold star and torch on blue identifies Indiana only to people who already know the flag.
From banner to flag
The 1917 act called Hadley's design the state banner, not the state flag, a distinction that mattered to almost no one but persisted in the statute books for nearly four decades. In 1955 the General Assembly cleaned it up, formally redesignating the banner as the state flag and standardizing its dimensions. Modern law and practice allow the usual flag sizes, with 2:3 and 3:5 the standard proportions, and the state settled the colors as Pantone 072C for the blue and 109C for the gold; the Indiana Historical Bureau publishes hex equivalents of #000F5D and #D59F0F for digital use. The design itself has never been revised. Every Indiana flag flying today is Hadley's 1917 drawing plus the legislature's one word.
Hadley lived to see his flag fly for more than half a century. He died in 1971 in Richmond, Indiana, and his hometown named a middle school after him. His watercolors hang in Indiana museums and, by a 1951 newspaper's accounting, in most Indianapolis high schools, but the torch and stars are the work strangers know.
How it ranks
In the North American Vexillological Association's 2001 survey of state, territorial, and provincial flag designs, Indiana placed 32nd of 72, in the upper half and well clear of the seal-on-blue flags crowding the bottom. Its virtues are the ones the 1916 contest asked for. The flag is legible at a distance, drawable from memory, and unlike anything else on an American flagpole: no other state flies a torch. The stars reward a second look with arithmetic, the composition survives being shrunk to a lapel pin, and the whole thing is the product of a state asking artists, rather than a committee with a seal and a bedsheet, what its flag should be. Indiana's centennial gift to itself turned out to be one of the more durable pieces of American flag design, unchanged since the year the United States entered the First World War.
References
[1] Indiana Code § 1-2-2 (state flag description).
[2] Indiana Historical Bureau, "The Indiana State Flag." https://www.in.gov/history/about-indiana-history-and-trivia/emblems-and-symbols/indiana-state-flag/
[3] "Flag of Indiana," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Indiana
[4] Indiana History Blog (Indiana Historical Bureau), posts tagged Paul Hadley. https://blog.history.in.gov/tag/paul-hadley/
[5] Mooresville Public Library, "Paul Hadley, Designer of the Indiana State Flag." https://mplindianaroom.blogspot.com/2010/04/paul-hadley-designer-of-indiana-state.html
[6] North American Vexillological Association, "2001 State and Provincial Flag Survey." https://nava.org/digital-library/design/surveys/