Tennessee State Coat of Arms

The design is circular rather than a traditional heraldic shield. A horizontal line divides the circle into two equal halves, with the word AGRICULTURE labeling the upper section and COMMERCE labeling the lower one. The upper half holds three agricultural symbols; the lower half holds a riverboat on water.

Tennessee uses this design as both its Great Seal and its coat of arms. Around the outer edge, the words The Great Seal of the State of Tennessee run above and the year 1796 appears below, marking the year Tennessee entered the Union. The Roman numeral XVI sits prominently at the very top of the inner design.

Tennessee entered the Union on June 1, 1796, as the 16th state, and its first constitution required an official seal. However, Governors John Sevier and Archibald Roane used personal seals for the next several years while the design was being arranged.

On September 25, 1801, the Tennessee General Assembly appointed committees to prepare a design and motto. The state contracted William and Matthew Atkinson, seal makers, to produce the physical seal. Governor Roane applied it officially for the first time on April 24, 1802.

The design remained largely unchanged for over a century. In 1929, the phrase Feb. 6th, 1796 was removed from the outer ring. In 1987, the 95th General Assembly passed Public Chapter 402, which replaced the original boatman figure in the lower half with a larger, more detailed rigged vessel and standardized the design for all official uses. That 1987 version is the current standard.

The design uses six distinct elements arranged within two semicircles. Each is labeled or identified by its position within the halved circle.

The horizontal split in the design is not decorative. It is a statement about how Tennessee's founders understood the state's economy. Agriculture and commerce were not the same activity; they were two halves of a working system. Farming produced goods; waterway commerce moved them.

The choice to label each half directly was also deliberate. Most state coats of arms use symbols alone and leave meaning implicit. Tennessee labeled each section with its category and then put the category name in its motto. The coat of arms and the motto say the same thing twice, in images and in words.

XVI at the top sits outside the agriculture-commerce split entirely. Statehood order was the founding generation's way of measuring belonging: Tennessee was the 16th state, not a territory anymore, and the designers made certain that fact appeared first.

The Tennessee design has been re-engraved and standardized over time, but the core imagery has remained the same: XVI at the top, agriculture in the upper half, and a vessel for commerce in the lower half.

The clearest documented visual milestones are a nineteenth-century printed rendering and the standardized modern artwork adopted in 1987. Earlier statutory changes, including the 1929 border-text revision, did not create a completely different composition.