Nebraska State Coat of Arms

The coat of arms is the shield device from Nebraska's great seal. The shield arranges several scenes from the settlement era side by side: a craftsman at work, a river with a steamboat, a locomotive, farmland, and mountains behind a rising sun. The images cover the major industries and geography of early Nebraska in a single frame.

Below the shield, the state motto Equality Before the Law appears on a scroll. The coat of arms appears on official state documents and in government buildings. It is a separate element from the circular great seal, which surrounds the shield design with a text border.

The Nebraska Territory was created on May 30, 1854, by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The territory operated under its own seal for thirteen years before Congress admitted Nebraska to the Union. Nebraska became the 37th state on March 1, 1867.

The first Nebraska state legislature adopted the state seal, which includes the coat of arms design, in 1867. The designers chose symbols that reflected Nebraska's economy and landscape at the time of statehood: skilled labor, river and rail transportation, farming, and the western mountain horizon.

The design has remained essentially unchanged since 1867. Nebraska's coat of arms is one of the more densely illustrated state arms in the country, placing multiple distinct scenes on a single shield.

The Nebraska coat of arms arranges several distinct scenes across the shield. Each element refers to Nebraska's geography or economy at the time of statehood in 1867.

The Nebraska coat of arms places the tools and transportation of the settlement era on one shield. The blacksmith at the anvil stands for the labor that built the state. The steamboat on the Missouri River and the locomotive represent the two forms of transportation that carried settlers into Nebraska Territory and goods out of it.

The wheat sheaves show the farming economy that followed the early settlement years. The Rocky Mountains in the background locate the design in the landscape of the American West. The motto Equality Before the Law adds the legal principle that shaped the post-Civil War era into which Nebraska was born.

The Nebraska Territory operated from 1854 to 1867 with its own territorial seal. When Nebraska achieved statehood in 1867, the first legislature adopted the current coat of arms design. No separate officially adopted territorial coat of arms image has been identified that predates the 1867 state design.

A useful historical rendering does survive in an 1891 published state illustration. It shows the same blacksmith, transport, wheat, and mountain scene in nineteenth-century print form rather than as a modern digital vector.