Alaska State Flag

The Alaska Department of the American Legion sponsored the contest in 1927, open to students in grades seven through twelve. Around 700 designs came in from across the territory. Most went to predictable places: the territorial seal, the midnight sun, the northern lights, polar bears.

Benny Benson looked at the night sky instead. He lived at the Jesse Lee Home for Children in Seward, and the constellations visible from there — the Big Dipper, Polaris — became his design. The legislature adopted it on May 2, 1927. Benson received a $1,000 scholarship and an engraved watch.

The flag was built for a territory, not a state. Thirty-two years later, when Alaska became the 49th state on January 3, 1959, lawmakers made no changes to it. Benson's design is the only official flag Alaska has ever had.

The 700 contest entries that came in from across the territory went for the predictable options: polar bears, the northern lights, the midnight sun, the territorial seal. Benson ignored all of them. He submitted the night sky visible from Seward — a design that worked because it said something accurate: Alaska is a place defined by its latitude. The flag doesn't use a seal or a decorative motif, it uses constellations that actually appear overhead in Alaska. That specificity is why the design still works.

Benson's own explanation covered the symbolism precisely. The Big Dipper represents strength through the Great Bear — Ursa Major — an animal central to Alaska's landscape and to Indigenous traditions across the region. Polaris marks Alaska as the northernmost state and, in Benson's words, represents its future. The navy blue field he assigned two meanings: the Alaskan sky and the forget-me-not flower. These weren't added in retrospect — they were in the original submission.

When Alaska became a state in 1959, no one proposed replacing the flag. The territorial design passed directly into statehood. That continuity is unusual: many territories redesigned their symbols at statehood. Alaska kept a 13-year-old's work, and it has remained the state's symbol for nearly a century.

The flag uses two colors: navy blue and gold. Both came directly from Benson's original design. Alaska statute does not define exact Pantone, CMYK, or hex values, which means manufactured flags vary slightly in shade. Navy blue (#0F204B) and gold (#FFB612) are the conventionally accepted digital values.

No other elements — no seal, no text, no border — appear on the flag. The two-color simplicity is part of what earned Alaska's flag a 5th-place ranking among all North American flags in a 2001 design survey by the North American Vexillological Association.