Official and Traditional Colors of Vermont

Vermont is one of only a handful of U.S. states whose name contains a direct color reference. The name derives from the French Verts Monts — Green Mountains — as recorded by Samuel de Champlain and subsequent French explorers who documented the forested spine running the length of what would become the fourteenth state. When Vermont declared independence as a republic on January 15, 1777 — becoming the first new political entity in North America to prohibit slavery in its founding constitution — and was admitted to the Union as the 14th state on March 4, 1791, the green of its mountains was already encoded in the state's name. No other color is as definitionally connected to Vermont's identity as green, a theme repeated in Vermont's motto history.

The University of Vermont, chartered in 1791 and one of the oldest universities in the United States, adopted green and gold as its official colors, creating an institutional anchor for the pairing that extends the color identity beyond the purely natural into Vermont's academic and athletic life. UVM's Catamounts compete across NCAA Division I sports in green and gold uniforms that mirror the Vermont landscape, ensuring that the state's traditional color pairing has consistent, high-visibility representation in competitive contexts. The university's adoption of the same palette that nature imposed on Vermont's landscape reflects the deep connection between Vermont's environment and its institutional character.

Vermont's forest cover — approximately 78 percent of the state's 9,616 square miles — is the defining environmental fact of the Green Mountain State. The Green Mountains, a southern extension of the Appalachian range running 160 miles from the Massachusetts border to the Canadian border, are covered in northern hardwood and boreal forest that presents a nearly unbroken canopy of green from late spring through early autumn. The Long Trail, completed in 1930 as the oldest long-distance hiking trail in the United States, traverses the full length of the Green Mountains along a 272-mile route through this forest. Vermont's forest cover underpins the state's $1.5 billion outdoor recreation economy, regulates the watersheds of the Connecticut and Winooski Rivers, and sequesters carbon at a rate that makes Vermont one of the lowest per-capita carbon-emitting states in the nation.

Vermont produces more maple syrup than any other U.S. state, accounting for more than 40 percent of national production from approximately 6 million taps across the state's sugar maple forests. The sugar maple (Acer saccharum) — Vermont's official state tree — produces both the amber-gold syrup that has defined Vermont's agricultural identity for centuries and the brilliant gold foliage that makes Vermont's autumn the most photographed seasonal display in North America. Vermont's fall foliage season, which peaks between late September and mid-October, attracts an estimated 3.5 million visitors annually and generates over $460 million in economic activity — making the gold of autumn Vermont's most economically significant color. The gold of hay fields, the amber of farmstead cheese, and the warm yellows of goldenrod along Vermont roadsides extend this palette through the agricultural landscape that defines Vermont's rural character.