West Virginia's flag is a white banner bordered in blue, carrying a coat of arms drawn in the first months of the state's existence. Two men, a farmer and a miner, flank a boulder carved with the date June 20, 1863. That date is the reason the state exists: West Virginia is the child of the Civil War, the only American state created by breaking away from a Confederate state. The arms have been constant since 1863, but the flag around them took three attempts and 66 years to settle, mostly because of a practical problem: nobody could affordably manufacture the early versions.
A state born in war
When Virginia voted to secede from the Union in 1861, its northwestern counties refused to go along. Delegates meeting in Wheeling organized a loyal government, and after two years of legal and military maneuvering, West Virginia was admitted to the Union as the 35th state on June 20, 1863.
The new state needed emblems immediately. The legislature turned to Joseph H. Diss Debar, a French-born artist and land agent from Doddridge County, who designed the great seal and coat of arms adopted on September 26, 1863. Diss Debar packed the state's founding into one scene: a farmer with his axe beside sheaves and a cornstalk, a miner with his pickaxe beside an anvil and hammer, and between them a boulder ivy has begun to cover, inscribed with the date of statehood. In front lie two crossed hunting rifles under a red Phrygian cap, the classical emblem of liberty: the state's freedom was won and kept by force of arms. Diss Debar also supplied the motto on the scroll below: "Montani Semper Liberi," mountaineers are always free, a sentiment he knew from his native mountains in Alsace.
Two false starts
For its first four decades, West Virginia had emblems but no settled flag. An 1864 authorization gave Civil War regiments a banner to carry, and after that the matter rested until the state prepared its exhibits for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. The commission running the exhibit used a state banner there, and in 1905 the legislature adapted it into the first official flag: white field, blue border, a sprig of Rhododendron maximum, the big laurel that schoolchildren had chosen as the state flower in 1903, on the obverse, and the coat of arms on the reverse.
A flag with different front and back is really two flags sewn back to back, and manufacturers charged accordingly. In 1907, ahead of the Jamestown Exposition, the legislature tried rearranging the sides, putting the arms on the obverse and the rhododendron on the reverse. The expense and awkwardness remained. Flags made informally for the state's fiftieth anniversary in 1913 pointed toward the solution: the rhododendron wreath curved around the seal itself, everything on one face.
The 1929 flag
The legislature made that arrangement official on March 7, 1929. The current flag has a white field bordered by a stripe of blue, with the coat of arms at center wreathed by rhododendron and topped by a red ribbon lettered "State of West Virginia." Both sides are identical. The proportions follow those of the United States flag, and when the flag is fringed, the fringe is old gold.
The white field is commonly read as purity, the blue border as the Union the state fought to stay inside. Mostly, though, the flag is its arms: the design puts the 1863 tableau front and center and leaves it to do the talking. West Virginia has never seriously revisited the design since, and the flag flew over the Capitol in Charleston in essentially the same form through the state's centennial in 1963 and sesquicentennial in 2013.
Reading the arms
Everything in the emblem is specific. The farmer's axe and the plow at his feet are the timber and farms of the valleys; the miner's pickaxe and anvil are the salt, iron, and coal that were already being dug in 1863. The boulder is the state itself, its date freshly carved. The ivy creeping up the rock was Diss Debar's touch for permanence: the young state would grow old. The rifles and liberty cap are a warning as much as a memorial, and the motto beneath frames the whole scene as a definition of the people who live above the Alleghenies' coal seams.
By modern design standards the flag commits the usual sins of its era, a detailed emblem with lettering on a plain field. West Virginians have shown little appetite for change. The arms mean too much: no other state flag records, in a single carved date, the decision of its people to leave one country and stay in another.
References
[1] "State Flag," e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. https://www.wvencyclopedia.org/entries/535
[2] "Flag of West Virginia," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_West_Virginia
[3] "About the Seal," West Virginia Secretary of State. https://sos.wv.gov/about-us/about-seal
[4] "September 26, 1863: The First West Virginia Legislature Adopts State Motto and Great Seal," West Virginia Public Broadcasting. https://wvpublic.org/story/radio/september-26-1863-the-first-west-virginia-legislature-adopts-state-motto-and-great-seal/
[5] "Official State Symbols of West Virginia," West Virginia Legislature. https://www.wvlegislature.gov/Educational/Kids_Page/symbols.cfm