Line up all fifty American state flags and one silhouette breaks the pattern. Ohio's flag is not a rectangle. It is a burgee, a swallowtail pennant with a deep fork cut into the fly, the shape of a cavalry guidon or a yacht club flag rather than a piece of state bunting. It is the only non-rectangular state flag in the country, and one of very few non-rectangular national or subnational flags anywhere; Nepal's is the famous other. The design was not the product of a committee or a schoolchildren's contest. It was drawn by an architect for a world's fair, and the legislature had the sense to adopt it without improvement.
An architect at the fair
John Eisenmann was a Cleveland architect and civil engineer who taught at the Case School of Applied Science and co-designed the Cleveland Arcade, one of the country's first indoor shopping arcades. In 1901 Ohio commissioned him to design its building at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, the great fair remembered now mostly as the place where President McKinley, an Ohioan, was assassinated that September.
Eisenmann designed the state's pavilion, and he designed a flag to fly over it. Instead of putting the state seal on blue cloth, the reflex that produced most American state flags in those decades, he drew a swallowtail burgee: a blue triangle at the hoist charged with stars and a circle, and five stripes tapering into the forked tail. The flag flew at the exposition through 1901, and on May 9, 1902 the Ohio General Assembly adopted it as the state flag, making Ohio the twentieth state to adopt one. The design in the statute today is Eisenmann's design, unedited, with official proportions of 8:13.
Reading the burgee
The flag compresses a surprising amount of information into a few shapes. The seventeen white stars are Ohio's place in the Union: the seventeenth state, admitted in 1803. Thirteen of them cluster around the circle for the original thirteen states, and the other four sit in the point of the triangle, bringing the count up. The white circle with its red disc center is the flag's best trick, a double image that reads as the letter O for Ohio and as a buckeye, the shiny brown-and-tan nut of the state tree, which gave Ohio its nickname and its people theirs.
The larger geometry is landscape. The blue triangle is read as the state's hills and valleys, and the five alternating stripes, three red and two white, as its roads and waterways. Those meanings have traveled with the flag since its early years and appear in the state's own accounts of the design. Whether Eisenmann intended every layer or later explainers filled some in, the result is a flag that works both as symbolism and as pure form: nothing on it needs a magnifying glass, and the silhouette alone identifies it.
Seventeen folds
Ohio has resisted every urge to tinker with the flag itself, but the twenty-first century brought two additions around it. In 2002 the legislature adopted an official salute: "I salute the flag of the state of Ohio and pledge to the Buckeye State respect and loyalty." It is short enough that schoolchildren actually learn it.
The better story came three years later. The U.S. flag has a famous thirteen-fold ceremonial folding; a burgee, with its forked tail, cannot be folded the same way, and no procedure existed for Ohio's. Alex Weinstock, a Boy Scout from Junction City, worked one out as his Eagle Scout service project: a method requiring two people and exactly seventeen folds, one for each of Ohio's number in the order of statehood, finishing with the red-and-white circle showing. His procedure went to the legislature as House Bill 552, and Governor Bob Taft signed it into law on February 15, 2005, adding it to the Revised Code as Section 5.014. Few states have a legally specified flag-folding ceremony at all; Ohio's was written by a teenager.
The shape as identity
A century in, the burgee has become inseparable from how Ohio presents itself. The flag's outline shows up in tourism logos, on highway signs, in sports branding, and stamped on state documents, doing work that a rectangular seal flag could never do, since the shape alone is the identifier. Vexillologists, who spend much of their energy pleading with states to simplify their flags, generally hold Ohio's up as proof that a state flag can be distinctive without being cluttered: two colors plus white, no text, no seal, one joke hidden in plain sight for anyone who notices the O is also a buckeye.
Eisenmann died in 1924, long before flag design became a subject anyone ranked or gave talks about. His burgee has now outlived the exposition it was made for by more than a century and remains what it was on the day the legislature adopted it: the only flag of its kind in the United States.
References
[1] "Flag of Ohio," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Ohio
[2] Ohio Revised Code, Section 5.01 (state flag) and Section 5.014 (folding procedure). https://codes.ohio.gov/ohio-revised-code/section-5.014
[3] Ohio History Central, "Ohio's State Flag," Ohio History Connection. https://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Ohio%27s_State_Flag
[4] Ohio Secretary of State, "Ohio's State Symbols," profile of the flag and its history. https://www.ohiosos.gov
[5] "Flag of Ohio," Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/flag-of-Ohio