Vermont State Coat of Arms

Vermont's coat of arms uses a full landscape scene instead of the geometric divisions found on most state shields. Where most American state arms divide their field into quarters or geometric bars, Vermont's shows a scene that looks like a view of the state itself.

Above the shield sits a stag's head as the crest. Below the shield, two pine branches cross to form the Vermonter's Badge. A motto scroll beneath that reads Vermont; Freedom and Unity.

The design begins with Ira Allen, younger brother of Ethan Allen and one of the founders of Vermont. In 1779, while Vermont was still an independent republic and not yet a U.S. state, Ira Allen designed the Great Seal of Vermont. Reuben Dean carved the image. Most of the elements on the modern coat of arms come directly from that 1779 seal.

The earliest known printed use of the coat of arms is on a $5 banknote issued by the Vermont State Bank in 1807. One of those notes is preserved in the special collections of the Vermont History Center in Barre. Before that note was discovered, historians had placed the earliest record at an 1821 military commission.

In 1821, Robert Temple, Secretary of the Governor and Council, added the stag's head as the crest. He designed the image for military commissions issued by Governor Skinner to officers of the state militia. The pine branches appeared in the Revised Statutes of 1840 and are said to represent the pine sprigs worn by Vermont soldiers at the Battle of Plattsburgh in 1814.

In 1862, Professor George W. Benedict wrote a formal description of the arms using quasi-heraldic terminology. The Vermont Legislature adopted this description as Act No. 11 of 1862, making it the first time the coat of arms had legal standing under state law.

The coat of arms places all its major symbols within or immediately around a landscape shield. Each element was present in some form by 1840 and all were codified together in the 1862 statute.

The landscape shield does something unusual: it shows what Vermont looks like rather than using abstract heraldic symbols. Mountains, a sky, a tree, a farm animal, and harvested grain together create a picture of the state rather than a geometric diagram of its history.

The pine branches below the shield are the one element that points directly to a single historical event. They connect the coat of arms to the Battle of Plattsburgh and to the Vermont soldiers who fought there, giving the design a specific human reference alongside the agricultural scene above.

The elements of the Vermont arms appeared in various forms over decades before the 1862 formal adoption. The landscape came from Ira Allen's 1779 seal design, the stag's head entered in 1821, and the pine branches were in use by 1840.

What survives visually are later historical renderings that show how those pieces were combined before and after the 1862 statute. These images document the evolution of the same basic composition rather than complete redesigns.