Maine’s First Flag
Maine became a state in 1820, but it wasn’t until 1901 that it got its first official flag: a green pine tree and blue star on a buff, or tan, colored field. The original Maine flag flew for only eight years before being replaced with the current blue flag featuring the state seal in 1909 The “Star & Pine” flag has recently made a comeback as more and more Mainers are choosing to send it up their flagpoles instead.
The 1901 law describing the original Maine flag lays out the size and location of the the pine tree and star, but does not specify an exact design for either:
The State Flag is hereby declared to be buff charged with the emblem of the State, a pine tree proper in the center and the polar star (a mullet of five points), in blue in the upper corner. The star to be equidistant from the hoist and upper border of the flag, the distance from the two borders to the center of the star equal to about one quarter the hoist. This distance and the size of the star being proportionate to the size of the flag.
The few surviving examples depict highly-stylized trees that are not easily reproducible and can only be painted, printed or embroidered onto a flag field.
Our Original Maine Flag
We use an appliqué process to make our flags from scratch. We honor the 1901 flag design, but our process can’t provide the detail of the hand-painted silk designs remaining from that era. We wanted a design that was historically accurate, which led us to Maine’s other official state flag. In addition to the currently and commonly used blue flag, Maine has a white merchant and marine flag flown by Maine-flagged ships. This flag – which dates from 1939 – contains a green pine tree which we feel looks great on the original Maine flag design.
We were the the first to produce an original Maine flag using the historically accurate Maine merchant and marine flag tree, we can’t and don’t claim any copyright or trademark to it. We’ve never felt it was ours, and we hope others use it too!
Our design is certainly catching on. As of February 2021, we have shipped some 4,000 handcrafted original Maine flags and countless stickers, patches, hats, shirts, sweatshirts and other products to almost all U.S. states and several countries.