Pennsylvania's flag belongs to the largest and least loved family in American vexillology: a coat of arms centered on a dark blue field. More than twenty states fly some version of the formula. What Pennsylvania's version has going for it is age and pedigree. The arms on the flag were drawn up in 1778, when Philadelphia was the de facto capital of the Revolution, and nearly every element on them, the ship, the plow, the wheat, the horses, was chosen by people for whom those objects were daily economic reality rather than heraldic filler.
Arms older than the republic's constitution
The commonwealth's coat of arms first appeared in 1778, credited to Caleb Lownes of Philadelphia, and its elements had already been circulating on the seals of Pennsylvania's early counties before they were combined into one shield. Read together, they are a compact inventory of what Pennsylvania did for a living. The ship under full sail is commerce, Philadelphia then being the busiest port in America. The plow is the labor that cleared and worked the interior. The three golden sheaves of wheat are the harvest that made Pennsylvania the young country's breadbasket.
Above the shield sits a bald eagle. Below it, a cornstalk and an olive branch cross stems, plenty and peace. A red ribbon carries the motto: Virtue, Liberty and Independence.
The supporters are the flag's most distinctive detail. Where other states prop their shields with allegorical women or frontier hunters, Pennsylvania uses two black draft horses, harnessed as if they had been unhitched from a wagon moments before. They rear up against the shield in a pose that is pure heraldic convention, but the harness is the point: these are working animals, on a working state's arms.
A century of freelancing, then a commission
The General Assembly authorized flags bearing the arms for state militia units on April 9, 1799, and for the next several decades Pennsylvania's flags were whatever their makers decided. Some units put the arms in the canton of a US flag, replacing the stars. Others centered them on blue. Civil War regiments carried state-arms colors of varying design, and a flag made for Governor Andrew Curtin's use at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery in 1863 ringed the arms with a circle of stars.
The artwork drifted too. Engravers and painters redrew the arms freely, changing the horses' color and posture, the shape of the shield, the tilt of the eagle. In 1874 the state appointed a commission to establish a single authoritative version, and its report of March 17, 1875, fixed the arms in the form still used, black horses included.
The flag followed a generation later. An act of June 13, 1907, standardized the state flag: the 1875 arms, embroidered on a blue field, with the statute directing that the blue match the blue of the flag of the United States. That single specification is the flag's most concrete design decision, tying the state's color permanently to Old Glory's. The act was thorough in the manner of its time, prescribing arms embroidered in silk on both sides of the flag, a knotted yellow fringe two and a half inches wide, and dimensions working out to an unusual 27:37 ratio. Mass-produced flags today are printed rather than embroidered and cut to ordinary proportions, but the statutory version, fringe and all, is the one that stands beside the rostrum in Harrisburg.
Life in the seal-on-a-bedsheet pack
The 1907 flag has now flown unchanged for over a century, which is either stability or stagnation depending on who is asked. When the North American Vexillological Association surveyed public opinion on 72 US state, territorial, and Canadian provincial flags in 2001, Pennsylvania's placed 57th, scoring 3.69 out of 10. The complaints were the standard ones for the genre: too complex to read at a distance, too similar to the dozen other blue-field arms flags, impossible to draw from memory.
The legislature's main response over the years has been to propose making the flag more crowded rather than less. Between 2004 and 2014, several bills sought to add the word "Pennsylvania" in yellow silk letters beneath the arms, on the theory that labeling the flag would at least solve the identification problem. None passed. In 2023, state representative Joe Webster took the opposite tack and proposed a commission to study a full redesign, an idea that has continued to circulate without yet becoming law.
There is no organized constituency for the current flag in the way Chicago or Texas partisans defend theirs, but there is no strong movement against it either. Pennsylvania's flag mostly persists the way the arms themselves have persisted since 1778: by being official, and by outlasting everyone who suggests changing it.
References
[1] "Flag of Pennsylvania," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Pennsylvania
[2] "Coat of arms of Pennsylvania," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Pennsylvania
[3] Act of June 13, 1907 (P.L. 560, No. 373), Pennsylvania General Assembly, standardizing the state flag.
[4] North American Vexillological Association, "2001 State/Provincial Flags Survey."
[5] "Pennsylvania (U.S.)," Flags of the World. https://www.crwflags.com/fotw/flags/us-pa.html