Great Seal of Florida

Florida adopted its first state seal in 1868, the year it was readmitted to the United States after the Civil War. The seal was designed to convey Florida's landscape and identity: a woman scattering flowers, a palm tree, a steamboat, and the rising sun over the water. The motto "In God We Trust," which later became the national motto as well, was included from the beginning.

From the start, the seal contained errors. The bird shown near the palm was identified as a cockatoo, a species not native to Florida. The woman scattering flowers was a generic figure with no specific identity, and some renderings of the seal showed distant mountains or highlands in the background, a landscape that does not exist in Florida. These problems were widely noted but went uncorrected for more than a century.

In 1985, the Florida legislature passed a bill revising the seal. The woman was redrawn as a Seminole woman in traditional patchwork dress, making her identity specific and accurate to Florida's history. The non-native cockatoo was removed. The distant highlands were eliminated. The corrected version was signed into law and has been the official seal since. Florida Statute § 15.03 governs its current authorized form.

The 1985 seal connects Florida's official identity to specific, accurate elements of the state. The Seminole woman represents the Seminole people, the only Native American group in the continental United States that never signed a peace treaty with the federal government and was never forced to relocate. Their presence in Florida is a defining fact of the state's history.

The sabal palm is Florida's official state tree, designated in 1953. Its appearance on the seal predates that designation; the palm was already understood as the defining tree of Florida's landscape when the seal was first designed in 1868. The steamboat on the water reflects the role of river and coastal transport in 19th-century Florida, when steamboats were the primary means of moving people and goods through the state's waterways.

The current Florida seal, revised in 1985, uses landscape and figure to place the state in a specific time and geography. Each element was either original to 1868 and confirmed by the revision, or was corrected to reflect accurate Florida imagery.

Florida's seal underwent its most significant change in 1985, when the legislature corrected factual errors that had been in the design since 1868. The core composition, a woman, a palm, a steamboat, and a rising sun, remained the same; what changed was the accuracy of the specific imagery.