Kansas flies one of the most literal flags in the country: the full state seal, a miniature landscape painting with a sunrise, a steamboat, a wagon train, and a buffalo hunt, set on dark blue with a sunflower perched above it and the state's name spelled out underneath in case any doubt remains. Flag designers cite it as an example of what not to do, and surveys rank it near the bottom of American state flags. Its history is more interesting than its design, and includes a failed experiment no other state tried in quite the same way: before Kansas had a flag, it had a banner that could not be flown from a flagpole.
A banner nobody could fly
In 1925 the Kansas legislature, wary of putting a rival next to the Stars and Stripes, adopted a state banner rather than a flag: the state seal and a sunflower on a blue field, designed to hang from a horizontal bar carried between poles, the way a marching society's banner might be. The distinction was deliberate. A banner, the thinking went, would honor the state without competing with the national flag on a pole.
The format failed almost immediately. The banner was awkward to carry in parades, could not be hoisted on a standard flagpole, and was rejected for display in Washington, D.C., where flags of the states were flown in conventional fashion. Complaints accumulated for two years before the legislature conceded that Kansas needed an actual flag.
Hazel Avery's parade flag
The design that became the state flag started as a piece of home sewing. Hazel Avery, a seamstress in the town of Lincoln, Kansas, designed and made a flag for a Fourth of July parade in Lincoln in 1925: the state seal on a blue field with a sunflower above it. The design circulated, and Adjutant General Milton R. McLean, who wanted Kansas troops to have proper colors, championed it in the legislature. Lawmakers adopted it in 1927, retiring the banner. Avery's original hand-sewn flag stayed in Lincoln, where it was kept as a local treasure.
The adopted flag is proportioned 3:5. On a standard-size flag the specifications call for a seal 17 inches in diameter with a 6-inch sunflower above it, the flower resting on a bar twisted in gold and blue. The sunflower and bar together are the official crest of the state, and the sunflower had been the state flower since 1903.
Reading the seal
The seal, adopted in 1861, is a compressed history of the Kansas frontier drawn as a single valley scene. In the sky, 34 stars mark Kansas as the 34th state, admitted on January 29, 1861, less than three months before the Civil War opened at Fort Sumter. Above the stars arcs the motto "Ad astra per aspera," Latin for "To the stars through difficulties." The difficulties were not hypothetical. The territory had spent the late 1850s as Bleeding Kansas, where free-state and pro-slavery settlers killed each other over which kind of state it would become.
Below the stars, a sun rises over hills in the east. A river carries a steamboat, standing for commerce. A settler's cabin and a man plowing a field stand for agriculture, which would define the state's economy. Beyond the plowman, a train of ox wagons heads west, and past them two Native Americans on horseback pursue a herd of retreating buffalo. The scene is usually read left to right as a chronology, with the hunt giving way to the wagons and the plow. As a document of how 1861 Kansas saw itself and its future, the seal is candid; the displacement it depicts was policy.
Adding the name
For its first three decades the flag was blue field, seal, sunflower, and nothing else. The trouble is that this describes half the flags in the Union. More than twenty states use a seal centered on a dark blue field, and from a flagpole they are effectively identical. In 1961 the legislature addressed the problem head-on by adding KANSAS in gold block capitals below the seal.
The addition solved the identification problem while cementing the flag's reputation among designers as a cautionary tale. A standing principle of flag design holds that lettering is an admission of failure, since a flag exists to be recognized without being read. Kansas is one of many states on the wrong side of that principle, and one of the few to have doubled down on it by statute.
The bottom of the rankings
When the North American Vexillological Association surveyed 72 U.S. state, U.S. territorial, and Canadian provincial flags in 2001, Kansas placed 69th with a score of 3.01 out of 10, ahead of only Nebraska, Montana, and Georgia's since-replaced 2001 flag. The complaints were the predictable ones: an illegible seal, lettering, and near-total interchangeability with its neighbors.
Redesign advocates surface periodically, as they have in most seal-on-blue states since Utah and Minnesota adopted simplified flags in 2023 and 2024, and Kansas campaigners point to the sunflower as an emblem strong enough to carry a flag by itself. No proposal has gained traction in the legislature. For now the flag remains what it has been since 1961: the whole story of the state, printed small, with the name attached.
References
[1] Wikipedia, "Flag of Kansas." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Kansas
[2] Lincoln County, Kansas, historical archives, "Lincoln's Hazel Avery Made State's First Flag." https://www.ksgenweb.org/KSLincoln/resources/stories/stories18.htm
[3] WorldAtlas, "Kansas State Flag." https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/kansas-state-flag.html
[4] North American Vexillological Association, "2001 State/Provincial Flag Survey." https://nava.org/digital-library/design/surveys/2001-State-Provincial-Flag-Survey.pdf
[5] Ted Kaye, Good Flag, Bad Flag: How to Design a Great Flag, North American Vexillological Association (2006).