History of the South Dakota State Flag: Sunshine, a Seal, and the Mount Rushmore Era
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From the first adopted flag of 1909 to the landmark 1963 two-sided redesign and the 1992 nickname change — the complete record of how the Mount Rushmore State's flag came to look the way it does today.
South Dakota's Flag in Brief
The South Dakota state flag is one of the more distinctive in the nation — a sky-blue field carrying a large golden sunburst at its center, within which sits the state seal, and around which arches the state name above and the state nickname below. The flag's current form is the result of three separate legislative actions spread across 83 years: the initial adoption in 1909, a major functional redesign in 1963, and a nickname update in 1992.
Unlike many state flags — which are essentially the state seal on a colored background — South Dakota's flag has a genuinely graphic identity. The sunburst gives it a visual centerpiece that works at distance, on a windy day, and at the top of a 40-foot pole in the same way it works in a photo. That was not an accident: the 1963 redesign was specifically intended to produce a flag that read as a unified visual object from both sides, which is a problem most state flag designers never considered.
The state motto — Under God the People Rule — rings the seal and has appeared on every version of the flag since 1909. It is one of the oldest and most direct expressions of popular sovereignty in any state's founding documents, and it connects the flag visually to South Dakota's constitutional identity from the moment of statehood in 1889.
South Dakota's Path to Statehood and the First Flag
South Dakota achieved statehood on November 2, 1889 — the same day as North Dakota — when President Grover Cleveland signed the proclamations admitting both Dakotas, along with Montana and Washington, to the Union in a single week. Cleveland reportedly shuffled the papers before signing to ensure no one could determine which Dakota was admitted first; both states claim equal seniority as the 39th and 40th states.
The Dakota Territory had been organized in 1861 and had pushed for statehood through most of the 1880s. The population of the southern half had grown rapidly with the Homestead Act of 1862 bringing settlers to the James River Valley and the discovery of gold in the Black Hills in 1874 drawing miners and entrepreneurs to the western part of the territory. By 1889, the southern Dakota Territory had the population and economic infrastructure to support statehood, and the Republican-controlled Congress — looking to add reliably Republican states before the 1890 midterms — moved quickly.
The new state did not immediately adopt a flag. In the 1880s and 1890s, most states did not have official state flags; flags were primarily military and naval instruments, and civilian state identity was expressed through seals, mottos, and official documents. The movement to establish distinctive state flags grew through the early 1900s, partly driven by the growing practice of displaying state flags at national expositions and in state capitols, and partly by the Spanish-American War and the emergence of state National Guard units that needed flags to carry.
The South Dakota State Flag: Every Change, Every Year
The Flag Across Three Legislative Eras
Every official version of the South Dakota state flag has shared the same sky-blue field and the same state seal at its center. What changed across 83 years was the design architecture around that seal — and the words that identified the state.
What Every Element of the South Dakota Flag Means
The South Dakota flag contains three distinct visual layers: the field color, the sunburst, and the state seal. Each layer carries its own meaning, and together they form one of the more symbolically complete state flags in the nation.
Every Element of the South Dakota Seal — Decoded
The state seal at the center of the flag is a compact symbolic inventory of South Dakota at the time of statehood in 1889. Each of its five pictorial elements represents a sector of the state's economy and geography. Understanding the seal is understanding the flag.
Why Mount Rushmore Replaced "The Sunshine State" — and Why It Matters for the Flag
The 1992 nickname change was not merely a branding update. It reflects a genuine shift in how South Dakota understood and projected its identity in the late 20th century — away from a generic geographic description shared with Florida and toward the specific, powerful landmark that had become the state's most recognizable symbol nationally and internationally.
Mount Rushmore was carved between 1927 and 1941 under the direction of sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who proposed the project and lobbied Congress and the South Dakota Legislature for decades to secure funding. The site — a southeast-facing granite face in the Black Hills chosen specifically for its sun exposure and rock quality — was originally called the Six Grandfathers by the Lakota Sioux. Borglum selected the four presidents: Washington for the nation's founding, Jefferson for the Louisiana Purchase that brought the Dakota Territory into American hands, Lincoln for the preservation of the Union, and Theodore Roosevelt for his role in the development of the American West and the Panama Canal.
The carving was never fully completed — Borglum died in March 1941, and his son Lincoln Borglum oversaw the final months of work before funding ran out and the project was halted in October 1941. Borglum had planned a grand Hall of Records carved into the mountain, which was never built. The carved faces themselves have required ongoing maintenance and stabilization work since completion.
By 1992, Mount Rushmore was receiving more than two million visitors annually — a figure that has since grown to more than three million. It was, and remains, South Dakota's dominant national identity marker. The Legislature's decision to put "The Mount Rushmore State" on the flag was a recognition that the most effective thing the flag could communicate about the state was the one thing no other state flag could claim.
The Lakota Perspective: The land on which Mount Rushmore stands was part of the Great Sioux Reservation established by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 and was taken from the Lakota following the Great Sioux War of 1876–77. The United States Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians (1980) that the seizure of the Black Hills was illegal and awarded compensation of $105 million — an award the Lakota have refused to accept, insisting on the return of the land rather than monetary settlement. The Lakota continue to refer to the mountain as the Six Grandfathers. This context is part of the complete history of the symbol the state chose for its flag.
Why the 1963 Redesign Was a Genuine Achievement in Flag Design
Most U.S. state flags adopted in the early 20th century share a fundamental design problem: they place a complex seal on one side of a colored field, which means the reverse side shows the seal as a mirror image. For flags hung in still air — in a courtroom, a school hallway, an auditorium — this is only mildly inconvenient. For flags on outdoor poles, where wind causes constant rotation, it means that half the time the flag is displaying a backwards seal to anyone looking at it.
Most states have simply accepted this. A handful have addressed it over the years — some by constructing flags from two separate panels sewn back to back, each with a correctly oriented print, others by designing seals that are radially symmetrical and thus read the same from both sides. South Dakota's 1963 solution was different and more elegant.
By placing the state seal inside a golden sunburst — itself a radially symmetrical design — and constructing the flag so that the seal is printed or embroidered correctly on both faces, the redesign achieved true two-sided readability without resorting to the double-panel construction that adds weight and cost. The sunburst became not just a practical solution but a genuine design contribution: it gave the flag a graphic identity that stands apart from the seal-on-field formula used by most of its contemporaries.
Ida Anding McNeil, to whom the sunburst design is attributed, was not a professional flag designer — she was a South Dakota civic figure who proposed the solution to the Legislature's flag committee. The fact that her design has remained essentially unchanged for more than sixty years is a measure of how well it solved the problem it was designed to address.
Pair this history guide with our size guide (pole height to flag size) and material guide (nylon vs. polyester for every SD setting).
South Dakota Flag History: Common Questions
Fly the Mount Rushmore State Flag with American-Made Quality
Every South Dakota flag from Tidmore is Made in the USA, FMAA-certified, and available in nylon, polyester, and indoor fringed styles — sized for every setting from a Sioux Falls porch to a Black Hills commercial pole.
