New Haven Flag

The flag of New Haven is a plain white field bearing the corporate seal of the city in black. The seal is circular and reads SIGILL. CIVITAT. NOVI-PORT. IN REPUB. CONNECTICUTENSI, Latin for the seal of the city of New Haven in the state of Connecticut, closed by the date 1784, the year New Haven was incorporated as a city. Inside it a three masted ship rides in the harbour, below a helmeted classical head in profile set among scrollwork.

The colour of the seal is not settled. In 2008 the city clerk told Flags of the World that New Haven uses a white flag with a black seal, which is the version shown here. A contributor to the same reference reported examining a copy of the flag in New Haven and finding the seal printed in dark blue.

Everything the flag says, the seal says. New Haven was founded as a port, and the device is a harbour scene: a ship at the entrance of the bay, the water beneath it, the city name rendered in Latin as Novus Portus, the new port.

The date 1784 is not the date of the flag or even of the seal. It marks the year the city was incorporated, with Roger Sherman, a signer of the Constitution, as its first mayor. The seal was drawn the winter after that, and kept the incorporation year in its legend.

The seal came first, by roughly a century. Ezra Stiles, president of Yale, recorded its making in his diary in February 1785. On 3 February he noted: With Messrs. Hillhouse and Meigs devising a City Seal. Eight days later he wrote: Finished the City Seal. The Devise, the Harbour of New Haven, a Ship at the Entrance, and an Ionic Pillar entwined with a Grape Vine. Under the Ship at the Mouth of the Harbour, MARE LIBERUM; and round the Seal SIGILL. CIVITAT. NOVI-PORT. IN REPUB. CONNECTICUTENSI. 1784. His collaborators were James Hillhouse and Josiah Meigs, the city clerk.

Compare that description with the seal on the flag today and two elements are missing. There is no Ionic pillar entwined with a grapevine, and the motto Mare Liberum, the free sea, is gone. Both appear to have dropped out of the design at some point that is no longer traceable.

The flag itself is harder to date. A post resolution of June 1888 complained that the city of New Haven has neither national flag or city flag to display upon said monument and asked the city government to provide both for a soldiers monument, which puts the first New Haven city flag at 1888. What that flag looked like is not recorded. No ordinance adopting the present white and black design has been found, and the best evidence for it remains the city clerk confirming it in 2008.