The Illinois Flag Commission is currently holding a vote for the new Illinois flag. The designs include the current design, Illinois’ centennial and sesquicentennial flags, and even ones created by average Illinois citizens.
There’s been plenty of confusion among Illinoisans lately about why our flag is potentially getting redesigned. The Senate and House both approved the creation of the Illinois Flag Commission in March, 2023, which was simply to create a new design for the state flag.
Plenty of state flags have been recreated recently, including Mississippi’s in 2021, Minnesota and Utah’s in 2024. Mississippi and Minnesota’s old flags were changed to remove racist design elements, but Utah’s and Illinois’ flags were/are getting changed to make them simpler-looking.
Of the top ten flags submitted by citizens, they all represent different parts of Illinois. Several contain either twenty-one stars or stripes to represent how Illinois is the twenty-first state of the United States. A few also include silhouettes of president Abraham Lincoln or of Illinois’ borders. One includes the state butterfly, the Monarch, and another includes the state flower, the violet. Overall, each proposed flag design represents Illinois in a multitude of ways.
Surprisingly, Illinois established its original official flag nearly 100 years after it became a state. According to the Illinois Flag Commission, the flag was initially designed in 1911 for a contest created by a woman named Ella Park Lawrence. Lawrence was part of a group called the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), which is a service organization with members consisting of specifically female descendants of patriots of the Revolutionary War. Today, Ella Park Lawrence is still known as the “mother of the Illinois state flag.”
The winner of the competition was a woman named Lucy Derwent; she won a monetary prize and her design became the state flag four years later on July sixth, 1915.
On September sixteenth, 1969, the Illinois flag was altered to have “ILLINOIS” written underneath the design. However, the Illinois Flag Commission states that the law altering the official Illinois flag “did not address specific flag design specifications”— therefore, a flag committee was appointed and created specific rules on how the Illinois flag should look.
By July first, 1970, a revised design created by Florence Hutchinson, an Illinoian genealogist and vexillologist from Greenfield, was approved. This revision added the sun and water from the state seal and officially established the rules about what specific colors should be used for the Illinois seal. This revision became the flag we know today.
All of the proposed flags for the vote can be seen and voted for online on the Illinois Flag Commission portion of the Illinois Secretary of State website. Voting will be closed on February 14th.
