Arizona State Flag

The flag's origin is one of the more unusual in American vexillology. When the Arizona National Guard rifle team arrived at Camp Perry, Ohio, in 1910 for a national competition, every other team had a flag or emblem. Arizona had nothing. Colonel Charles W. Harris and W. R. Stewart of Mesa put a design together on the spot. Stewart's wife Mae sewed the first version from an envelope sketch.

Carl Hayden — Arizona's first U.S. Representative and later a long-serving U.S. Senator — contributed to the design as well. His wife Nan Hayden sewed the first official state flag when the legislature took up the design seven years later.

The Third Arizona Legislature adopted the flag on February 27, 1917. Governor Thomas Campbell received the bill but never signed it. He also never vetoed it. Under Arizona procedure, the bill passed into law without his signature. Campbell never publicly explained why he withheld it.

Arizona's flag works as a state symbol because every element in it is Arizona-specific. The copper star refers to an industry that built the state's economy and still defines it. The red and gold rays reference the Spanish colonial history that shaped Arizona's language, place names, architecture, and law before the territory ever joined the Union. The blue connects Arizona to the Colorado River — the water source that made large-scale settlement of the desert possible.

The flag also carries an unintentional layer of meaning: it was never designed to be a state symbol. It came out of necessity at a rifle competition, put together on the spot by people who needed to identify their team. That origin — practical, improvised, not ceremonial — fits a state whose identity is built more on what people built in a difficult environment than on formal tradition.

Arizona's flag uses four colors: blue, red, old gold, and copper. State statute specifies Pantone and Cable values for blue and red — the two colors shared with the U.S. flag — but does not define official values for gold or copper. This means the gold and copper shades vary between manufacturers.

Blue (#002147) and red (#BB133E) are legally defined. Old gold (#FFF22D) and copper (#A96A31) are conventional values only.