Kentucky's flag shows two men in the middle of what is either a handshake or a hug, depending on the rendering: a frontiersman in buckskin and a statesman in formal dress, circled by the motto "United We Stand, Divided We Fall." The image sits on a navy blue field with "Commonwealth of Kentucky" arced above and sprigs of goldenrod below. It is a seal-on-blue flag of the classic American type, adopted in 1918, standardized in the early 1960s, and carrying at its center one of the most durable cases of mistaken identity in American state symbolism.
An art teacher's design
By the time Kentucky got around to legislating a flag, versions of one already existed. Flags bearing the state seal on blue had been used to represent Kentucky since at least the 1880s, at expositions and by militia units, without any legal standing. The design the General Assembly finally adopted on March 26, 1918, came from Jesse Cox Burgess, an art teacher in Frankfort, the state capital. Burgess's contribution was arrangement rather than invention: the seal centered on navy blue, the Commonwealth's name above, and below the seal a garland of goldenrod, the plant Kentucky would formally name its state flower in 1926.
The 1918 act was thin on specifics, which is a recurring theme in early state flag laws. It established the flag without pinning down the exact drawing of the seal, the shade of blue, or the proportions, and manufacturers filled the gaps however they liked.
The seal and the myth of Boone and Clay
The seal is much older than the flag. Kentucky separated from Virginia and entered the Union in June 1792, and that December its first governor, Isaac Shelby, commissioned a seal showing two friends embracing, with the motto "United We Stand, Divided We Fall." The motto is generally traced to "The Liberty Song," written by the Pennsylvania patriot John Dickinson in 1768, with its line "by uniting we stand, by dividing we fall." Shelby, a Revolutionary War veteran, is said to have been fond of the song.
Over two centuries the embrace loosened into a handshake and the two friends acquired costumes: one became a frontiersman in fringed buckskin, the other a statesman in a tailcoat. Popular tradition promptly named them Daniel Boone and Henry Clay, Kentucky's two most famous sons. The identification appears on postcards, in classrooms, and in gift shops, and it cannot be right. When the seal was commissioned in 1792, Henry Clay was fifteen years old and living in Virginia; he would not arrive in Kentucky until 1797. The official reading is that the figures are types, not portraits: the pioneer and the politician, the two kinds of men who made the state, agreeing to hold it together.
The motto has carried extra weight in Kentucky. As a border state, it stayed in the Union in 1861 while sending tens of thousands of its sons to each side of the Civil War. A state whose seal warns that divided it falls spent four years testing the proposition.
Standardized in 1962
For four decades after 1918, no two Kentucky flags looked quite alike. Seals were redrawn freely, the figures migrated around the field, and the blue wandered. The General Assembly fixed this in its 1962 session with what became KRS 2.030, a statute notable in Kentucky legal history as reportedly the first to include illustrations: the law shows the flag rather than merely describing it. The standardized design was finalized in the early 1960s and remains in force.
The statute sets the proportions at 10:19, the same unusual ratio as the United States flag, and puts the seal's diameter at roughly two thirds of the flag's width. It specifies the wreath of goldenrod below the seal, in two curving sprays, and the lettering of "Commonwealth of Kentucky" above. Kentucky also acquired a pledge to its flag in 2000, one of a minority of states with such a text, saluting "the Kentucky flag, and to the Sovereign State for which it stands."
A face in the crowd
Kentucky's flag has the standard problem of its genre. On a pole at any distance it is a dark blue rectangle with a light disc in the middle, indistinguishable from the flags of Kansas, Nebraska, Idaho, and a dozen other states. In the North American Vexillological Association's 2001 survey of 72 state, territorial, and provincial flags, Kentucky placed 66th of the 72 flags rated.
The flag has nonetheless stayed put while other seal-on-blue states have moved. Utah and Minnesota adopted simplified designs in the 2020s, and redesign campaigns exist in several more, but no serious legislative push has emerged in Frankfort. Whatever its shortcomings at a distance, the flag close up contains a genuinely good emblem: a two-word constitutional argument, illustrated by a hug, that predates the state's first birthday.
References
[1] Kentucky Revised Statutes § 2.030, "State flag" (1962 specifications). https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/statutes/
[2] Wikipedia, "Flag of Kentucky." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Kentucky
[3] Wikipedia, "Seal of Kentucky." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_of_Kentucky
[4] WorldAtlas, "Kentucky State Flag." https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/kentucky-state-flag.html
[5] North American Vexillological Association, "2001 State/Provincial Flag Survey." https://nava.org/digital-library/design/surveys/2001-State-Provincial-Flag-Survey.pdf