WEST VIRGINIA, FLAG OF

U.S. state flag consisting of a white field (background) bordered in blue and featuring a coat of arms in the centre. Around the coat of arms is a wreath of the big laurel (Rhodendron maximum), which was designated the state flower in 1903. The following year the big laurel was featured on the obverse side of a flag made to represent West Virginia at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, held in St. Louis, Missouri. The flag was white with a blue border, and the state coat of armspart of the state seal designed by Joseph H.D. Debar and adopted in 1863appeared on the reverse. The legislature recognized that flag on February 24, 1905, but on February 25, 1907, it switched the positions of the state arms (to the obverse) and flower (to the reverse) and added a scroll with the phrase State of West Virginia below the arms. The scroll was moved above the arms in 1929. The farmer and the miner in the coat of arms flank a rock inscribed with the date of West Virginia statehood, June 20, 1863. The cap of liberty and crossed rifles in the foreground are symbolic of the Latin motto below, Montant semper liberi (Mountaineers are always free)a reference to the fact that the mountainous areas of western Virginia seceded from the rest of the state in 1861 when slave-holding Virginia became part of the Confederacy. One further change was made in the state flag, on March 7, 1929. Because of the expense and difficulty of manufacturing a double-sided flag, the legislature voted to frame the state arms with branches of big laurel and to show the same emblem on both sides of the flag. Whitney Smith History Some 14,000 years ago Indian hunters entered the Ohio and Kanawha valleys in pursuit of mammoths. Around 9000 BC the Archaic people, with a small-game hunting, fishing, and gathering culture, occupied the area. Their successors, the Adena, or Mound Builders (c. 500 BC to c. AD 100), created numerous earthworks still visible in the Moundsville and Charleston areas. The Adena were absorbed by the Fort Ancient people, who dominated the territory until they were wiped out by the Iroquois Confederacy around 1650. Except for scattered villages the area that was to become West Virginia remained Indian hunting grounds and battlegrounds when Europeans arrived in the 1700s. Colonial period and Virginia's dominion The second charter of Virginia in 1609 provided for settlement of that colony's western frontiers. Exploration and trade were further encouraged by Governor William Berkeley after 1660. The Blue Ridge was reached in 1670, and in 1671 another expedition encountered the first westward-flowing stream, the New River, in southwestern Virginia. The expedition descended the river to Peter's Falls on the future VirginiaWest Virginia border and claimed for England all the land drained by the New River and its tributaries. Subsequent Trans-Allegheny frontier settlement was handicapped by such factors as mountain barriers, Indian resistance, conflicting English and French claims in the Ohio valley, disputed land titles, and a royal proclamation of 1763 prohibiting occupancy. Despite these obstacles, the population increased, and discontent with the government east of the mountains became endemic. The Vandalia colony, proposed in 1769, and the 14th State movement for the establishment of a Westsylvania in 1776, indicate an early interest in a separate government for the Trans-Allegheny country. Dissatisfaction among the pioneers in that region mounted in the cultural, social, economic, and political realms. The frontier residents, who came from many areas, were distinctly different from the aristocratic eastern settlers. Furthermore, topographic differences rendered slavery economically unsound, and cultural heritage made it undesirable. Voting representation and taxation, however, decidedly favoured eastern Virginia.