Flag of the Day#5 – Lewes Delaware
The Lewes Delaware town flag is a for profit, commercial venture. The flag was designed by Alan Keffer, a Lewes resident, in 1991 (note the copyright notice on most online images).
As far as municipal flags go it is ok. It is 1000 times better than the City of Mesa Arizona’s flag but it falls just a little short of being a very good municipal due it a few unforced errors.
It is what you might call “faux historical.” For the seal, Keffer used the official seal used in the town of Lewes, England. That works. The earliest settles in colonial Lewes were Dutch, not English, so a flag designed to tell the town’s story might have evoked the flag of the Dutch West India Company, which was the commercial venture that set out to profit from this New World toe hold. That said, the twenty-eight people dropped off a little north of Cape Henlopen didn’t last long. They built a palisaded fort and affixed the “red lion, rampant,” of Holland to its gate in order to inform the locals that an attack on them was an attack on the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The locals were not impressed, or it must have been a shitty fort because within a year all but two of the settlers were killed and the fort was burned to the ground. The Dutch-ness of those ill-fated settlers gets some props from the flag’s background. It was adapted from the flag of the Zeeland Province.
Then the flag goes off the rails. The “1631” heraldic charge would be fine if it was under the shield, but the the “Lewes, Delaware” gives up the game. If anything, the change should be the town motto in latin. But the motto is boring. “The first town in the first state” which renders into latin poorly: Primum oppidum in primo rei publicae. A more fitting script would have been “hoc emere vexillum” which google tells us is latin for “buy this flag”
By the way, that copyright? I’m not lawyer but with the design adopted by the Town as its official flag (September 13, 2004) how enforceable is it?
Lewes, Delaware
Mesa, Arizona
Dutch West India Company
Hahahaha I love that Mesa flag!!
That Lewes flag is really annoying. I’ll bet it’s really hard to find another that spells out the city AND state it represents, but I guess they figured they had to do that because they simply appropriated the city seal of Lewes, England, rather than devising their own (as, for example, Wilmington did). Even Mesa’s laughable flag — which looks like it advertises a dry cleaner’s — doesn’t spell out Arizona.
I also object to the 1631, as if a short-lived Dutch trading post (and whale fishery) has anything to do with the present-day city. The first actual European residents didn’t show up until 30 years later. Which also makes the “first town” claim pretty specious. I’d have to speculate that the first place in what became Delaware to resemble a town was New Amstel, which became New Castle.
I feel like I’ve found someone who thinks Lewes is as overrated as I do.
I really don’t have a whole lot against the cute, overpriced little tourist trap. You just got me wound up over that flag. The historical society has preserved some pretty cool buildings at their Shipcarpenter Square enclave.