Kentucky State Coat of Arms

The Kentucky coat of arms appears on a blue background with gold details. At its center, two men stand in a full embrace: one in frontier buckskin, one in a formal swallowtail coat. The outer ring of the design carries the words 'Commonwealth of Kentucky.' The state motto circles the two figures inside.

Unlike many state coats of arms built around a quartered shield or complex heraldry, Kentucky's design is built around a single human gesture. The coat of arms is also the state seal, and it appears on the state flag, official documents, and government buildings across the commonwealth.

Kentucky became the fifteenth state on June 1, 1792. That same year, on December 20, the Kentucky General Assembly passed an act creating the state seal. The act described the design simply: 'two friends embracing, with the name of the state over their heads and around about the following motto: United we stand, divided we fall.'

A Lexington silversmith named David Humphries was hired to engrave the original seal in 1793. Humphries made two changes from what the law described. Instead of hunting clothes, he dressed both figures in swallowtail coats. Instead of a handshake, he showed a full embrace.

The original seal was lost when fire destroyed Kentucky's first capitol in 1814. The design survived through copies and impressions made before the fire. New seals were produced to replace it, but different engravers interpreted the design differently over the following decades, producing versions that varied in the clothing, poses, and faces of the two figures.

In 1954, Louisville artist Ernie Giancola redesigned the seal with a more natural handshake between the figures. In 1962, the General Assembly settled the longstanding variation by legally specifying what the design should show: a pioneer meeting a gentleman in a swallowtail coat.

The Kentucky coat of arms builds its meaning around two figures and a motto rather than a divided shield with multiple emblems. Each element connects to the founding principles of the state.

The Kentucky coat of arms does not use a shield divided by the flags of past governments or military symbols. Instead, it uses a single moment: two people choosing to come together. The pioneer and the statesman represent the two groups who built Kentucky, and the embrace shows them acting as equals.

The motto adds a specific political idea to that image. 'United We Stand, Divided We Fall' was written in 1768 during the colonial crisis. By placing it on the coat of arms in 1792, Kentucky's founders connected the new state to the broader American case for unity.

The design has stayed recognizable across more than two centuries because the core image is simple enough to survive translation across engravers, artists, and printing technologies. The clothing and poses have shifted; the gesture has not.

The Kentucky coat of arms has gone through several distinct versions since 1792. Different engravers interpreted the original act in different ways, producing seals that varied in the clothing, poses, and faces of the two figures while keeping the same motto and the same basic gesture.

The original 1793 seal by David Humphries was lost when fire destroyed the state capitol in 1814. What survives is a long sequence of later renderings: early seal impressions, Victorian-era redrawings, early twentieth-century revisions, and the standardized form used today after the 1962 legislative clarification.