New Hampshire's flag belongs to the largest and least loved family in American vexillology: the state seal on a blue bedsheet. Nineteenth-century regiments needed something to carry, the seal was what a state had on hand, and by the early twentieth century the pattern had hardened into a default. But New Hampshire's version rewards a closer look than most. Inside the laurel wreath and the nine stars is a shipyard scene: the frigate Raleigh, hull up on the stocks, unfinished, with the sun rising behind her. It is one of the few American state flags that depicts a specific thing in a specific place at a specific moment, and the thing it depicts was captured by the enemy two years later.
A ship built in sixty days
In 1775 the Continental Congress authorized thirteen frigates, the first navy the colonies ever ordered. One of them went to the Piscataqua, the fast tidal river that divides New Hampshire from Maine. On Badger's Island, opposite Portsmouth, shipwrights under John Langdon's direction framed, planked, and launched the Raleigh in roughly sixty days in the spring of 1776, an astonishing pace for a 32-gun warship.
Her later career was less glorious. Chronically short of guns and crew, she got to sea in 1777, fought an inconclusive action against HMS Druid, and in September 1778, under John Barry, was run aground in Penobscot Bay while fleeing two British warships. The Royal Navy floated her off and took her into service, where she remained until the 1780s. The ship on New Hampshire's flag spent more years flying British colors than American ones. The seal shows her at the one moment when everything was still promise: on the stocks, bow raised, not yet launched.
The 1909 flag and the seal it inherited
New Hampshire had a seal long before it had a flag. A provincial seal existed from colonial times, and in 1784, when the state constitution took effect, a new state seal appeared with a ship on the stocks, a nod to Portsmouth's shipbuilding economy. For the next 125 years that seal did all the symbolic work. State regiments in the Civil War carried blue flags bearing versions of it, which is roughly how most seal-on-blue state flags got started.
The legislature made it official in 1909: the state seal, centered on a blue field, surrounded by a laurel wreath with nine stars interspersed. The nine stars are for New Hampshire's ratification of the U.S. Constitution on June 21, 1788. It was the ninth ratification, and the Constitution needed nine to take effect, so New Hampshire's vote is the one that made the document law. For a small state it is a large claim, and the flag makes it quietly, in star count rather than lettering.
The 1931 cleanup
The trouble with putting an engraved seal on a flag is that engravers improvise. By the twentieth century the seal existed in a mess of variants. Some versions showed cargo on the dock beside the ship, and tradition holds that one rendering included a rum barrel, which sat poorly with temperance-era sensibilities. Otis G. Hammond, director of the New Hampshire Historical Society, documented the drift in a 1916 study of the seal and flag, and in 1931 the legislature acted on it.
The 1931 law, effective January 1, 1932, is a remarkably exact piece of drafting. It names the ship as the frigate Raleigh, built in 1776, and pins down the whole scene. It specifies a rising sun showing about one third of its diameter above the horizon, the ship's bow sitting higher than the stern, the water of Portsmouth Harbor, and, in the foreground, a granite boulder, the legislature's one addition, put there so the Granite State's bedrock would appear in its seal. The statute also directs that the Raleigh fly the United States flag authorized by Congress on June 14, 1777. That makes New Hampshire's the only current state flag with the Stars and Stripes in it, and also a small impossibility, since the Raleigh was launched in May 1776, over a year before that flag existed. The lawyers of 1931 preferred patriotism to chronology.
Living with a mediocre ranking
Vexillologists do not admire seal-on-blue flags, and New Hampshire's placed 63rd out of 72 in the North American Vexillological Association's 2001 survey of state and provincial flags. The standard objections all apply: illegible at a distance, indistinguishable from a dozen neighbors, dependent on text to identify itself.
Reform efforts have gone nowhere. The Old Man of the Mountain, the granite face on Cannon Mountain that was the state's most recognizable emblem until it collapsed in May 2003, has been proposed as a replacement more than once, including a 2018 bill. In 2023 Representative Tim McGough proposed adding "Live Free or Die" to the flag; the House rejected it in February 2024. The motto, coined by General John Stark in 1809, already appears on the license plates, and legislators evidently felt the flag could keep its shipyard. For now New Hampshire flies the same design it adopted in 1909: a ship that was never quite finished on the flag, flying a flag that did not yet exist, above a boulder that was never there. Every detail of it is fixed by statute.
References
[1] New Hampshire Almanac, "State Flag," NH.gov. https://www.nh.gov/almanac/state-flag
[2] New Hampshire Revised Statutes Annotated, Chapter 3 (state seal and flag), including RSA 3:9 on the seal's design.
[3] "Flag and seal of New Hampshire," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_and_seal_of_New_Hampshire
[4] Otis G. Hammond, History of the Seal and Flag of the State of New Hampshire (1916).
[5] "Flag of New Hampshire," Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/flag-of-New-Hampshire
[6] North American Vexillological Association, "State and Provincial Flags Survey" (2001). https://nava.org