History of the Utah State Flag: From Deseret to the Beehive Flag

A Flag Shaped by Accidents, Arguments, and Ambition

Most state flags have straightforward origin stories: a committee chose a design, the legislature approved it, and it has flown more or less unchanged ever since. Utah's state flag history is nothing like that. The design that flew for over a century was adopted partly because a Philadelphia flag maker took unauthorized artistic license and partly because the state couldn't afford to redo the work. An 89-year error went unnoticed until 2011 because one flag maker's mistake was copied by every subsequent manufacturer. And the 2024 redesign that replaced it all emerged from the largest flag design public engagement process any American state had ever attempted.

At the center of it all — through every version of every flag, from the hand-embroidered 1903 Governor's Flag to the 2024 Beehive Flag flying over the Capitol today — is the same symbol: a beehive. It has represented Utah longer than Utah has been a state.

The Symbol Before the Flag: Deseret, the Beehive, and the Road to Statehood

The beehive was Utah's symbol before Utah existed. When Brigham Young led the first company of Latter-day Saint pioneers into the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, they were entering a landscape that belonged — by a technicality still being sorted out by the Mexican-American War — to Mexico. They called the land they intended to settle Deseret, a word drawn from the Book of Mormon meaning "honeybee."

The beehive was not chosen casually. It was an emblem of the community's founding philosophy: organized labor, collective self-sufficiency, and productivity wrested from an unforgiving desert environment. The settlers were a self-sufficient community, as one account of the era described it, producing all their needs from local sources as does a bee colony in a hive. The motto they adopted — Industry — was not just a slogan. In the early years, before supply routes were established and before the railroad arrived, it was a survival requirement.

In 1850 the territorial legislature adopted a seal for the Provisional State of Deseret that centered the beehive. When Congress organized Utah as a territory rather than admitting it as a state — rejecting the name Deseret in the process — the territorial seal kept the beehive. Utah would spend the next 46 years petitioning for statehood, submitting applications in 1849, 1856, 1862, 1867, and 1872, all rejected, largely over the question of polygamy practiced by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Statehood finally came on January 4, 1896, when President Grover Cleveland signed the proclamation admitting Utah as the 45th state. The date 1896 was immediately enshrined on the new Great Seal — alongside 1847, the year of pioneer settlement — to mark the span of Utah's founding struggle.

The $65 Seal: Harry Edwards and Charles Jackson, 1896

The Great Seal of the State of Utah was adopted on April 3, 1896, at the very first regular session of the new state legislature. The seal was designed by Harry Emmett Edwards, an artist who also worked as a bartender, and Charles M. Jackson, a crime reporter for the Salt Lake Herald. Their combined fee for the work: $65 — the equivalent of roughly $2,500 today.

The design they produced adapted the existing territorial seal and placed its elements on a shield. An American eagle with outstretched wings perches atop the shield — symbolizing U.S. protection and Utah's loyalty to the nation. The eagle clutches six arrows arranged crosswise at the top of the shield. Below the arrows, the word Industry arcs across the shield. Below that, the beehive sits at the center, flanked by growing sego lilies — the native flower that early settlers had eaten for survival when food ran short. Below the beehive: the year 1847. On each side of the shield, U.S. flags are draped on crossed staffs. Around the outer edge: "The Great Seal of the State of Utah," and at the base, 1896.

Edwards also modified the old territorial seal in one significant way: he added the bald eagle and the crossed U.S. flags, making an explicit visual statement that the long years of opposition were over. As one period account framed it, those crossed flags announced to the nation: despite all opposition, we made it — Utah is finally a state.

The Governor's Flag, the Battleship, and the Gold Ring That Changed History

Having a seal and having a flag are two different things. For seven years after statehood, Utah had one but not the other. Informal flags were flown for celebrations — in Kamas, a blue banner with a single star was carried on Bishop Antwood's sleigh through the streets; in Monticello, a woman on horseback rode through town carrying a blue banner with a white beehive — but none of these were official.

The Governor's Flag, 1903

The first official-ish Utah flag was created in March 1903, and its origin was a world's fair. Governor Heber M. Wells needed a flag to carry in the parade of states at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. He turned to the Utah State Society Daughters of the Revolution — not to be confused with the later Daughters of the American Revolution — and asked them to oversee the creation of a flag. On May 1, 1903, the governor marched under it in the St. Louis parade.

The flag was blue, with the state seal and the year 1896 hand-embroidered in white thread at the center. That first flag was known informally as the Governor's Flag. It was expensive to make, delicately embroidered, and intended for indoor display or careful parade use — not for flying outdoors. For the next decade, few people in Utah had ever seen a state flag, let alone owned one.

The Governor's Flag remained unofficial until March 9, 1911, when the Utah Legislature passed Senate Joint Resolution 17, making it the official state flag. The design that was codified specified the seal embroidered in white on a blue field — the same basic design the governor had carried in St. Louis eight years earlier. That date, March 9, would prove historically significant: it is now Utah State Flag Day, and it is the same date on which, exactly 113 years later, the 2024 Beehive Flag would become official.

The Battleship and the Accidental Gold Ring, 1911–1913

In August 1911, the United States Navy commissioned the battleship USS Utah — a dreadnought that would serve in both world wars before meeting its end at Pearl Harbor. The following year, the Sons and Daughters of Utah Pioneers decided to present a copy of the newly official state flag to the battleship's crew. They commissioned the flag from the Wm. H. Horstmann Co. of Philadelphia, a prominent flag and military goods manufacturer.

When the flag arrived, the group was stunned by what they found. Rather than the white-embroidered design specified in the statute, Horstmann had embroidered the coat of arms in full color and — exercising what one account called artistic license — had added a narrow gold ring around the seal that nothing in the law had authorized.

The reaction was not outrage. It was admiration. Rather than reject the flag and order a new one, the state embraced the unauthorized design. On March 11, 1913, the Utah Legislature changed the law to match what Horstmann had made. Governor William Spry signed the revision. The full-color seal in a gold ring became the official Utah state flag.

The flag was duly presented to the USS Utah. It was almost certainly still aboard the ship on December 7, 1941, when Japanese aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor. The USS Utah was among the first ships struck that morning and sank in the harbor. The original 1903 Governor's Flag, however, survived — it was later discovered in a forgotten box at the Utah Historical Society.

The 89-Year Error: How a Single Mistake Flew Unnoticed for Generations

In 1921, Utah was more than a quarter century into statehood and still essentially flagless in practice. Only one state flag existed — the presentation copy aboard the USS Utah — and it didn't comply with the statute anyway. When New York City invited Utah to display its state flag in a patriotic parade of states, the state couldn't produce one with public funds. Private organizations stepped up, as they had in 1903, and had new flags made.

The process continued in an ad hoc fashion. In 1922, a flag maker named Dolly McMonegal was commissioned to produce a version of the Utah state flag. She encountered a practical problem: her shield was too small to fit the year 1847 inside it, where the statute required it to be placed. So she moved it — stitching the date below the shield, just above the year 1896.

The error was small. It was not immediately noticed. And it propagated. Every flag maker who produced a Utah state flag after 1922 used McMonegal's flag as their model. For 89 years — from 1922 through 2010 — every Utah state flag produced showed the year 1847 in the wrong position.

The error was finally identified during research connected to the approaching centennial of the flag's 1911 adoption. In the 59th Utah legislative session in 2011, the Legislature passed House Concurrent Resolution HCR002 requiring flag manufacturers to fix the placement of 1847. In that same session, the Legislature passed House Bill 490 establishing March 9 as an annual Utah State Flag Day — the date of the original 1911 adoption.

The 2011 corrections also prompted a broader effort to produce a standardized artistic rendition of the flag and seal, since flag makers over the decades had frequently misrepresented other details of the coat of arms as well. The result was a more precisely documented version of the historic flag — the design that would fly for another 13 years until 2024.

The Governor Who Wanted a Simple Flag — And the Ogden Woman With a Design

The complex, embroidery-dependent design of Utah's flag was expensive and impractical for everyday outdoor use. In his address to the Utah Legislature in 1927, Governor George Dern — Utah's first non-Latter-day Saint governor — made an unusually direct request: Utah needed a simpler flag that could be made quickly and cheaply and could fly alongside the American flag outdoors. The current design, he argued, was a display piece, not a working flag.

Nothing was done. For three years, the governor's call for simplification sat unanswered.

In 1930, a flag enthusiast from Ogden named Lilliebell Falck approached Governor Dern with several simplified designs she had developed herself. Her favorite proposal was a white beehive with 28 lines to represent Utah's counties, on a plain field. It was clean, readable at distance, and cheap to produce.

Nothing was done with this proposal either. The 1913 flag — complex, expensive to reproduce, and carrying an error nobody had yet caught — continued to be Utah's official state flag for another 81 years.

More Than a Flag: The Public Redesign That Produced the 2024 Beehive Flag

In 2021, the Utah state government formed a task force to oversee a formal flag redesign — the first time in Utah's history that a structured public process had been mounted to create a new state flag. The timing aligned with a growing national conversation about state flag redesigns, and with a recognition that Utah's flag — while historically significant — remained one of the hardest state flags in the country to recognize or reproduce.

On January 19, 2022, Governor Spencer Cox announced the More Than a Flag initiative, opening a statewide invitation for Utahns to submit new flag designs. By the April 2022 deadline, the response had exceeded all expectations: more than 7,000 submissions were received by the Utah Department of Cultural and Community Engagement. Of the 5,702 flag design submissions, 2,500 came from students representing all 29 Utah counties — a level of youth engagement that organizers had not anticipated.

Professional designers reviewed the submissions and developed a set of finalist designs based on the symbols and themes Utahns had identified as most important. On November 10, 2022, the task force selected the finalist design that would become known as the Beehive Flag.

The legislative process moved quickly. In the 2023 Utah Legislative session, Senate Bill 31 — State Flag Amendments — earned House and Senate approval. On March 21, 2023, Governor Cox signed SB 31 into law. The law established a waiting period, allowing time for the transition before the new flag took effect.

On March 9, 2024 — Utah State Flag Day, and exactly 113 years after the original flag adoption on March 9, 1911 — the Beehive Flag became the official state flag of Utah. The occasion was marked at the Capitol with a ceremony at which Governor Cox used a Navy officer's sword in the traditional naval tradition to cut the brail and hoist a 60-by-30-foot version of the new flag between two fire trucks.

Utah State Flag: Key Dates

What the Utah State Flags Represent

Both the 2024 Beehive Flag and the Historic State Flag carry layered symbolism. Here is what each element means — on both the current flag and the one it replaced.

The 2024 Beehive Flag

The Historic State Flag (1913–2024)

Utah State Flag History: Common Questions