Vermont's flag is the state coat of arms centered on a dark blue field, which makes it easy to lump in with the twenty-odd American state flags that follow the same formula. The arms are worth a closer look than the formula suggests, because they descend from the seal of an independent country: the Vermont Republic, which governed itself from 1777 to 1791 before becoming the fourteenth state. And the plain blue flag is the third design Vermont has flown. The first two were near-copies of the Stars and Stripes, and both caused exactly the confusion you would expect.
A flag with seventeen stripes
Vermont joined the Union in 1791 as the fourteenth state, and when Kentucky followed in 1792, Congress updated the national flag to fifteen stars and fifteen stripes. The precedent seemed clear: a stripe and a star for every state. So when the count reached seventeen, Vermont acted on the assumption that the US flag would too. On May 1, 1804, the state adopted its first flag, a banner of seventeen stripes and seventeen stars with VERMONT lettered across the top.
The US flag never made the change. Congress let the fifteen-stripe flag stand until 1818, then reset the stripes to thirteen permanently. Vermont's flag was left as a striped orphan, resembling a national flag that did not exist. On October 20, 1837, the state tried again with a design closer to the real US flag: thirteen red and white stripes, with the canton holding one large white star containing the state's coat of arms. It was tidier but no more distinctive. At any distance, both nineteenth-century Vermont flags read as the Stars and Stripes, and complaints about the resemblance ran for decades.
The 1923 solution
The fix came from an existing design. The governor of Vermont already had a flag, blue with the state's coat of arms, and on June 1, 1923, the General Assembly made that design the state flag. The stripes were gone for good. What remained was the formula common to most of New England: arms on a blue field, at proportions of 3:5.
The choice traded one problem for another. Vermont's flag no longer looks like the US flag; it now looks like the flags of a dozen other states, blue fields with heraldic centerpieces that blur together at any distance. That trade has kept a low-grade replacement debate alive ever since.
Reading the arms
The coat of arms is a landscape, which is rare in American state heraldry; most states opted for shields quartered with tools and allegories. Vermont's arms show a place. A tall pine stands at the center of a green field, with a red cow on one side and three yellow sheaves of wheat on the other. Behind them the Green Mountains rise against a yellow sky. Above the shield is a stag's head on a blue and yellow wreath, and beneath it a red scroll reads "Vermont" and "Freedom and Unity." Crossed pine branches frame the shield, a reference, by tradition, to the sprigs Vermont soldiers wore at the Battle of Plattsburgh in 1814.
The imagery traces to the great seal that Ira Allen, younger brother of Ethan Allen and a founder of the Vermont Republic, designed in 1778: the seal already had the pine, the sheaves, the cow, and the motto. Every element is literal. The pine is the timber that built the state's early economy, the cow its dairy industry, the sheaves its fields, the stag its wildlife, and the mountains are the ones in the state's name, from the French "verts monts."
The Green Mountain Boys flag
Vermont has a second flag in circulation, older than the state itself. The Green Mountain Boys were the militia raised in the 1770s under Ethan Allen, first to defend New Hampshire land grants against New York claims, then to fight the British, taking Fort Ticonderoga in 1775. The flag associated with them has a green field and a blue canton scattered with thirteen white five-pointed stars.
The design was never adopted as the state flag, but it never quite went away either. The Vermont National Guard, which traces its lineage to the Green Mountain Boys, uses it, and it flies from porches and town greens around the state. Flag reform advocates regularly nominate it as a replacement for the seal-on-blue design, on the argument that Vermont already owns one of the most recognizable flags in New England and simply declines to use it. For now the cow keeps its post.
References
[1] "Flag of Vermont," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Vermont
[2] "Fun with flags," Vermont Historical Society. https://vermonthistory.org/vermont-history-state-flag
[3] "The evolution of Vermont's state flag through the centuries," WCAX (2023). https://www.wcax.com/2023/06/01/evolution-vermonts-state-flag-through-centuries/
[4] Vermont Statutes Annotated, Title 1, Chapter 11: State flag and coat of arms.