Washington's flag holds two distinctions no other state can claim: it is the only American state flag with a green field, and the only one with a president's face on it. The two facts are related. The state is named for George Washington, the only state named for a president, and it markets itself as the Evergreen State, so the flag is close to inevitable: the first president's portrait, ringed in gold, on a field of green. Behind that tidy result is a seal designed in an afternoon by a jeweler with an ink bottle and a silver dollar, and a flag campaign run by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
A seal drawn around a silver dollar
Washington entered the Union in November 1889, and in the rush to statehood somebody had to produce a state seal. The design brought to Charles Talcott, a jeweler in Olympia, was an elaborate one: Mount Rainier, wheat fields, sheep, the port of Tacoma. Talcott argued that a busy landscape would date badly and be impossible to engrave cleanly at small sizes, an insight flag designers would spend the next century relearning. His counterproposal took minutes. He inked the base of an ink bottle to draw the outer circle, a silver dollar for the inner one, and pasted a postage stamp bearing George Washington's portrait in the middle.
The lettering, "The Seal of the State of Washington 1889," was added by his brother L. Grant Talcott, and a third brother, G. N. Talcott, cut the printing die. By one account, the portrait was soon upgraded from the stamp to a color drawing of Washington that George Talcott found on a box of Dr. D. Jayne's Cure for Coughs & Colds. The constitutional convention adopted the seal in August 1889. A patent medicine crate is not the most dignified source for a state emblem, but the Talcotts' basic layout, a portrait in a lettered ring, has survived for over 130 years.
The DAR's flag
The new state went decades without an official flag. When Washington volunteers fought in the Philippine-American War in 1899, they carried an unofficial military banner: a gold profile of the first president on blue. A 1917 National Geographic spread on American flags showed a Washington design with a green field and the seal in gold, evidence that the green idea was circulating well before it was law.
The design that stuck came from the state chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. In 1915 the DAR formed a flag committee, led by Emma Chadwick, which settled on the state seal centered on green, and the organization spent years lobbying for official status. The legislature obliged on March 5, 1923. According to one sponsor of the law, the green field was the verdant country west of the Cascades and the gold ring the wheat lands to the east, a reading that compresses the state's geography into two colors.
The choice of green made the flag unique and slightly impractical. Green dye historically faded and cost more, which is one reason no other state uses it as a field. Cost has followed the flag from the start: the DAR's 1915 flag cost 48 dollars to make, roughly 1,500 in today's terms, and the law requires the seal to read correctly on both sides, so every flag needs the portrait executed twice. Willis Bloom of the secretary of state's office made the first official flag in 1924, and Washington's remains among the most expensive state flags to produce.
Gilbert Stuart, by way of 1967
By the 1960s the seal existed in a mess of variant renderings, some of them crude. In 1967 designer Dick Nelms redrew the portrait from Gilbert Stuart's painting of George Washington, the likeness Americans already knew from the dollar bill. The legislature approved the new seal that year and it went straight onto the flag.
The modern specification is precise. The field is Irish green, PMS 348. The ring, lettering, and optional fringe are Spanish yellow, PMS 116, and the background behind the portrait is Oriental blue, PMS 311. The flag may be made at 2:3, 3:5, or 5:8, with the seal's diameter equal to one third of the flag's length.
The redesign question
As a piece of flag design, Washington's banner breaks most of the accepted rules: it centers a lettered seal, it uses a portrait no one can render from memory, and it is costly to manufacture. Defenders answer that the green field alone makes it identifiable at a distance, which is more than most seal-on-blue states can say.
The legislature has started to entertain alternatives. A 2025 bill proposed a state flag redesign committee, made up of lawmakers from both parties, the Secretary of State, arts and historical agencies, and tribal representatives, to recommend a new design by July 1, 2028, with adoption contingent on a public referendum. Whatever comes of it, the current flag has already outlasted a century of design opinion, with the first president gazing out of a gold ring first traced around a silver dollar.
References
[1] "History of the State Flag," Washington Secretary of State. https://www.sos.wa.gov/statewide-programs/state-flag/history-state-flag
[2] "Flag of Washington," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Washington
[3] House Bill 1938 (2025), bill analysis, Washington State Legislature. https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Htm/Bill%20Reports/House/1938%20HBA%20SGOV%2025.htm
[4] Revised Code of Washington 1.20.010, state flag description.