Texas can lay claim to a truly iconic state flag, one we plaster on pickups and T-shirts and even pledge allegiance to in grade school. But did you know that dozens and dozens of Texas cities and counties also have flags? Neither did we until recently. But as soon as we found a website cataloging the flags, we fell into a rabbit hole of wonderment. The flags of Texas’s cities and counties run the gamut from good to bad to downright weird. The art of vexillology, the study of flags, is a passion for some and a chore for others, but it’s an important part of fostering a collective identity as a community. Who would Texans be, after all, without the iconic lone star?
The best of these designs are either classically iconic or hyperspecific and idiosyncratic in their imagery. The worst—and we are sad to report that there are a lot of these—are blandly corporate and inoffensive, while others delighted us with their charmingly amateurish designs. “Good” and “bad” are not adequate labels to contain the multitudes of approaches one can take to making a truly bizarre flag, whether because of the way aesthetics have changed over the past two hundred years or because somebody with a quixotic vision and a copy of Photoshop went off.
Texas Monthly writers Forrest Wilder and Dan Solomon went through the hundreds of flags to curate a collection that spans the various approaches to flag making by the cities and counties of Texas and offered some commentary on what they found. Take a look at the 75 flags that best exemplify the good, the bad, and the weird. As Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory said in the “Fun With Flags” episode, “You and I are going to explore the dynamic world of vexillology.”
The Good
Bastrop
Dan: Oh, this one is great. It’s got a real outsider art vibe to it. You could probably trick me into believing that Daniel Johnston drew this flag.
Forrest: I’m with you. Normally I would get irrationally angry about the wordy slogan, but this one is thought-provoking and invites contemplation. “PRESERVATION OF THE PAST—PROGRESS FOR THE FUTURE.” Why, yes, that’s it!
Brownsville
Dan: This has more life than most of them, but if you told me it was a flag for a Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville resort, I’d believe you.
Forrest: Hahaha. What are the chances that the building is swapped out for a SpaceX rocket?
Grimes County
Dan: Wait, this precedes the lone star flag? It belongs in a museum!
Forrest: Yep! At first I thought this was another bastardized lone star flag, where instead of the usual hijinks—replacing the star with the county seal or some such—they just made the shape long and weird. But I was very wrong. According to the Grimes County Commissioners’ Court, this flag is “reportedly the first Lone Star flag.” Designed by resident Sarah Bradley Dodson in 1835, “the banner was displayed in the town of Gonzales in October 1835 and, in December flew during the siege of Bexar.” Wow. I want one.
Dan: I will say that I think the one we settled on is better.
Gonzales
Dan: A subtle update on a classic—I’m all for it.
Forrest: An absolute winner.
Liberty
Forrest: Simple, timeless, captures the essence of the town and its name.
Dan: Plus a li’l communist? But in a stylish way.
League City
Forrest: Vaguely nautical, unusual design, cool tree. Seems like the coastal cities have some of the best flags.
Dan: I’m into this one too. Of all the contemporary-looking flags we’ve seen so far, this is the first one that looks like it was designed by someone who paid for Photoshop, instead of borrowing their nephew’s laptop to make the flag.
Midland
Forrest: Sure, the skyline is exaggerated and the token windmill is conspicuously smaller and farther in the background than the drilling rig, but there’s an excitement to this flag that most others lack. Midland, you surprise me.
Dan: It’s nice to see some energy in one of these slogan flags, for sure. I like the scribbled blue that they put the silhouette of all the tall buildings inside of; I like the exclamation point at the end of “Feel the Energy!”; I like the oil derrick for the L. Good job, Midland.
Rio Grande City
Forrest: Is that a chachalaca keeping watch over a cactus patch, some picturesque crops, and a stark desert hill? I want to live there.
Dan: The flowering cactus is a great touch. Everything here is on point.
Rockport
Forrest: One of my favorites. Captures the essence of the town and brings back happy childhood memories. Nine out of ten.
Dan: I especially like that it kind of looks like the heron is wearing sunglasses.
Southlake
Forrest: It’s not beautiful or original or inspiring. But it does speak to this affluent suburb’s infinite self-regard. It screams “new rich” and “you wish you were as good as us.” Perfect City, USA.
Dan: It’s like the shield is there to protect the city from the riffraff.
Sunnyvale*
Forrest: Looks like the flag of a breakaway province in the Sahel, not a small town in northeast Texas, but it still rules.
Dan: Oh, hell yeah. Easily the best riff on the Texas flag.
*Correction: After publication, someone from a PR firm representing the town of Sunnyvale alerted us to the fact that the town council had rejected the flag depicted above. The PR firm already has its hands full, dealing with Amazon sales of flags and other items using the unauthorized design. We certainly do not want to contribute to the problem.
The Woodlands
Forrest: This pioneering master-planned community thought of everything, including this tasteful flag that succinctly captures how The Woodlands offers the convenience of and proximity to the big city while paying homage to nature. (I feel like I just wrote some ad copy for The Woodlands Area Chamber of Commerce.)
Dan: For a flag whose foremost colors are various shades of brown, they did a really good job.
Weatherford
Forrest: Looks like the logo of a barbecue joint, but sure, why not.
Dan: They hired the same branding firm that every short-lived craft barbecue spot in Austin hired in 2011, but it worked for those places, and it works for the city of Weatherford too.
Wimberley
Dan: Wimberley adopted this flag after the 2015 Memorial Day flood devastated the town, and it’s clearly intended to inspire residents to be resilient in the face of catastrophe. It looks good while it does that, which is a bonus, and while I sure hope “We can survive a natural disaster together” isn’t an eternally relevant message, it’s probably worth keeping around anyway.
Forrest: I went to high school in Wimberley, and I of course recall the trauma that the flood caused. Thirteen people lost their lives in the area. To be honest, creating a permanent flag out of that horrific event could’ve gone wrong. A flag should be timeless, not a single tragedy or triumph frozen in amber. Luckily, the creators got it right. The Wimberley flag pays homage to the way the town came together in the aftermath of the flood, but twenty or fifty years from now, it will still celebrate universal virtues.
The Bad
Balch Springs
Dan: Everything about this one is a dud. Even the leaf in place of the dot on the i in “Springs” doesn’t make sense since it’s a capital I. And let’s not get too deep into that slogan, or we will get lost.
Forrest: The city is growing? It’s a growing community? It’s a city that farms community? Yes.
Bandera County
Dan: I want to like it because it’s trying something, but the red and green are hard to look at, and if your county shape is just some random geometric tangram, maybe don’t put the outline of the county on the flag.
Forrest: There are hard-core flag nerds called vexillologists, and they have developed a set of rules to guide flag making. This flag breaks almost all of them. It’s visually cluttered, it contains lettering, and it has a symbol—the outline of the county—that is unrecognizable to almost everyone. Plus, the color scheme, as you noted, has the neurological appeal of that episode of Pokémon that caused widespread seizures.
Cedar Park
Forrest: It’s just . . . a cedar leaf.
Dan: It should be a strip mall.
Copperfield
Forrest: The flag is just the word “Copperfield,” to which I say, “David?”
Dan: For my next trick, I’ll make the rest of the flag . . . disappear!
Early
Forrest: A kid in 1998 discovers the Comic Sans font on his computer.
Dan: This looks like a bootleg candy bar, and I’m not entirely mad at it.
Freeport
Dan: “Where Fun Happens” is a weird slogan for a city known for its petrochemical industry. I guess if you’re Dow Chemical, it’s probably a pretty good time.
Forrest: “Where Superfun(d) happens.” Get it?
Katy
Dan: What a strange thing to boast about in the slogan on the seal. All of Katy’s friends are jealous—none of them is the hub of that many counties.
Forrest: The South Texas town I grew up in briefly plastered “The Heart of the Future State Prison Expansion System” on welcome signs into town. Now that’s a brag!
McKinney
Forrest: Two things McKinney is not: “unique” and natural.
Dan: This one looks like a corporate logo that got refreshed in the nineties with a hand-drawn aesthetic to connect with the MTV generation, à la Pizza Hut or Burger King.
Panola County
Forrest: Hey, you try to draw the shape of Texas with your eyes closed. It’s not easy!
Dan: Genuinely stunned to learn that this was not designed by a child. I do hope they share whatever technology they’ve invented that allows them to shoot chickens, cows, and oil derricks with a laser (?) with the rest of us.
Pflugerville
Dan: This slogan doesn’t even make sense. They should go much bigger. No one will mind a tall tale if you sell it. “Pflugerville: We Beat Godzilla!”
Forrest: I think this is a riff on “quality of life”—a shamefully anodyne slogan for a town that has a Pflugerville Pfall Chili Pfest.
Ranger
Forrest: Looks like it was designed by a sixth grader . . . because it was.
Dan: I don’t mean to bash a child here, but I would humbly submit that perhaps the sixth graders of Ranger could benefit from a minor increase in arts funding.
Forrest: The first rule of vexillology—the art of flag making—is to make a flag simple enough that a child can draw it. The second rule of vexillology is to never let a child draw your flag.
Red Oak
Forrest: Who’s “RO,” and why is she being beaned with an acorn?
Dan: She’s RoAnn “RoRo” Oakleaf, founder of Red Oak, and she’s a Texas ico—wait, no, I made that up; I have no idea. This looks like the logo for a company that sends you postcards in the mail trying to buy your house for 30 percent less than it’s worth.
San Augustine
Forrest: Why is there a barred gate over the outline of Texas? “Welcome to San Augustine—now leave before you get shot for trespassing.” (They’ll also shoot you if you republish a copyrighted photo of their flag without permission.)
Dan: I went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to answer this question, and it led me to this old flag from the local Rotary club, which, at first glance, I thought put the state of Texas in a cage! It’s not a cage, though; it’s actually a baby crib, because San Augustine—which was home to three former Texas governors, two former Texas lieutenant governors, and several early figures in the Republic of Texas (including Sam Houston!)—considers itself the “Cradle of Texas.” I guess baby Texas moved to San Augustine after being born in Washington-on-the-Brazos. Anyway, maybe whoever designed the flag made the same mistake I did when looking at the Rotary club flag, and it ended up canonized? That’s the best I can do.
Forrest: That’s very interesting. I, however, continue to maintain that they just respect private property in San Augustine.
Schertz
Forrest: Many cities’ flags consist of nothing more than the city seal on a rectangle. This is lame and a vexillology no-no. But Schertz’s seal-flag is even worse. The city’s seal states “Seal of the City of Schertz,” which is like your flag saying “Flag of the City of Schertz.” Except this is even more confusing, because now you have a flag bearing a seal calling attention to the fact that it’s a seal.
Dan: You’re allowed to just not have a flag, if this is all the effort you’re willing to put into it.
Forrest: One solution would be for the city council members to vote to add the words “This Is Not the” in front of “Seal of the City of Schertz”—and then they could call it art.
Terrell
Forrest: Is the city half full or half empty? You decide.
Dan: The “America” is weird here too, right? This looks like a truck stop logo.
Victoria County
Forrest: There’s a lot to criticize here, but I can’t get past “First White Settlement” and “Where The History of Texas Began.” The flag was created in 1936, so that explains a lot.
Dan: Not only that, those faces look like they’re from a horror movie. That said, the city of Victoria (which is in Victoria County, though that’s not always a given in Texas) has a flag of its own, and while it’s just the city seal on a white background, I’m giving it a special shout-out for having the best city seal in Texas.
Waco
Forrest: Can Chip and Joanna take a crack at a new flag? This looks like the font you might find on a flag flying outside a regional capital in Turkmenistan.
Dan: Sadly, this flag was only adopted four months ago, so I think Waco is stuck with it for a while.
The Weird
Friendswood
Forrest: Take the French flag, rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise, throw in the silhouette of a tree . . . voila!
Dan: I kind of like this one, but if you asked me to explain exactly why, I would have nothing for you.
Frisco
Dan: I don’t get the slogan, but I do like that they’ve got a shield that makes Frisco seem like a hipster brewpub slash bike shop.
Forrest: I had a different reaction. At first glance, this reminded me of one of those hazmat signs on big rigs carrying toxic chemicals. I half expected the text to read “Hazardous Material: Stand Back 50 Feet.”
Hockley County
Forrest: This one’s unofficial—the county commissioners’ court apparently never voted to adopt it—and I can see why. Too many county and city flags are cluttered with symbols of the local economy and/or landscape. We get it: you grow cotton, raise cattle, pump oil, and educate kids. Imagine if the Canadian flag were a maple leaf and a hockey player and a moose and, I dunno, a portrait of Celine Dion.
Dan: In use since 1986, though! They’re proud of this flag in Hockley County, even if they’ve never voted for it. Anyway, the little Texas flag popping out of the middle reminds me of a cap gun with a li’l flag that says “Bang!” on it.
Jones County
Forrest: Maybe hands down the worst county flag?
Dan: It is truly hideous, but if you can decipher the code along the border, it will tell you who the Servant Girl Annihilator was, so it’s got that going for it.
Kemp
Forrest: Why is the font weathered? Why is there an asterisk after “Kemp”? Why is “Est. 1851” in such a tiny script?
Dan: This is a font called Bleeding Cowboys, and it was used to death on bro-y late-2000s and early 2010s country album covers. (It’s such a cliché that even the font creator is sick of it.) My hunch is that someone in Kemp was a fan of that music and pinched the font for the flag.
Forrest: How in the world do you know this?
Lewisville
Forrest: Looks like the flag for one of those megachurches with a single-word name, e.g. “Life.” “The pastor’s sermon this week is ‘Deep Roots. Broad Wings. Bright Future.’ ” And, uh, not to be pedantic, but how is the dove casting a shadow of Texas, and where are these deep roots we were promised?
Dan: That’s not a Texas-shaped shadow; it’s the actual state of Texas. That is one truly enormous bird blotting out the sun.
Lipscomb County
Forrest: What do you think—badass or just bad?
Dan: Points for originality, but everything in it is ugly. And why are the horns down? Did an Aggie make this?
Forrest: The Panhandle counties seem to have a knack for gauche flags, but I kinda like this one. It hits the farm-and-ranching theme without the use of eleventy-eight symbols drawn in crayon.
Mesquite
Forrest: This looks like a sign for a barbecue joint. The mesquite-flavored smoke emanating from the i and the promise of authentic service.
Dan: It’s like a barbecue joint you would find at a mall in Indiana.
Roanoke
Dan: I went over to Yelp and checked out the options in Roanoke. One of the most popular restaurants on the site is a place called Goat & Raven, which sounded promising, but alas, it serves neither goat nor raven. (It’s a barbecue spot, mostly, and it looks good, if not exactly unique—I’ll stop by if I’m in town.) There’s also a spot called Craft & Vine, serving neither crafts nor vines, which is probably for the best. Roanoke does have an Indian restaurant. I think “capital” might be overstating it, but I am hungry now.
Forrest: Dan, I nominate you for the Pulitzer. Good work, man.
Seguin
Forrest: “It’s real.” Was that in doubt?
Dan: That’s just what the deep state wants you to believe, sheeple!
Shackelford County
Forrest: The centerpiece of this flag is a white hole, perhaps representing the nothingness at the center of existence.
Dan: I feel it pulling me in, and I’m too tired to resist.
Swisher County
Forrest: So many symbols, so little space.
Dan: Honestly, of all the flags to place images of oil derricks and cows and crops around a big star, this is my favorite.
Ward County
Forrest: A real horror show. Imagine if the American flag contained an outline of the USA with each of the fifty stars placed in the approximate geographic location of the state.
Dan: I think if the stars were a little more spaced out and balanced within the design, I would kind of like this one?
Forrest: What if I told you the red portion of the flag isn’t even Ward County? The Pecos River—the squiggly line bisecting the flag—forms the southern boundary of Ward; the area immediately south includes portions of Reeves and Pecos Counties.
Dan: I hated all the parts of that sentence I understood.
Waxahachie
Forrest: Pick a slogan!
Dan: I like the vibe of this one, actually. The positioning around the seal makes it seem like Waxahachie is the Crape Myrtle Capital by day and Gingerbread City by night.
Wharton
Forrest: Are these two men gazing at each other? Or are they admiring this monument to former sheriff Hamilton B. Dickson, the cofounder of the local Reconstruction-era White Man’s Union Association? On a less sinister note, the image overall has a Rubin’s vase effect—do you see two male silhouettes and a monument, or a speeding train?
Dan: They’re in love and about to have their first kiss. It’s really quite beautiful.
Messing With Texas
Belton
Forrest: As we’ve discussed, your city seal does not make for a good flag. But this is downright blasphemous—like drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa.
Dan: Disrespectful.
Bosque County
Forrest: Sadly, it appears a county judge came up with this flag, which was never formally adopted. The oath of office ought to include a promise not to butcher the Texas flag.
Dan: When you said “butcher,” I assumed you meant metaphorically, but design literally throws what looks like a hunk of marbled meat on the white space.
Collin County
Forrest: A recurring theme is the desecration of the Texas flag, one of the greatest flags ever. I get why Texas counties and cities would want to wrap themselves in the lone star—the design is simple, memorable, iconic. It instantly conveys the Texan identity of independence. But here’s the thing: you can’t improve on perfection. Which brings us to Collin County. This affluent square of North Texas suburbia offers a case study in why you shouldn’t mess with the Texas flag. Collin County offers the answer to the question: What if Texas were actually Pac-Man?
Dan: I think this is my least favorite of the butchered Texas flags, because I just don’t understand it. I mean, I get that it’s the Texas flag as a C, for Collin, but it really does look more like Pac-Man than anything else, and the baby blue background is too random. There are certainly takes on the Texas flag that are uglier to the eye, but this one just feels cynical to me.
Cooke County
Forrest: The Texas flag, but she was trying to put her lipstick on while driving.
Dan: I will defend this one! What if Picasso had designed the Texas flag—would you still say that?
Forrest: I can see what they were going for—the squiggly line represents the Red River, which forms Cooke County’s northern border. But not even Picasso could save this bad idea. Call this one our Red River Rivalry.
Dallas County
Dan: I can’t tell if this is lazy or cool, like, literally cool. It feels refreshing to me, as though it lowers your body temperature a tenth of a degree to look at it.
Forrest: At first, my conspiracy brain thought maybe this was a comment on the Democratic nature of Dallas. But then I read the explanation for the color scheme—“The order establishing the flag specifies the shades as the same as those used on the flags of the United States and the United Nations”—and I immediately sent Alex Jones an email about the UN takeover of Dallas.
Hitchcock
Forrest: The jazz hands version of the Texas flag.
Dan: There’s something about this one that I appreciate. It seems earnest, like a community theater production of the Texas flag.
Navasota
Forrest: It’s the Texas flag, but with different dimensions, and the white and red bars are turned vertical, making it look like a French Texas flag, which could never be a thing. What is the plant? Is it a bluebonnet? Why is the top yellow?
Dan: I think if you dropped the bluebonnet (?), I’d be into the French-Texas hybrid flag. (We’re both very proud of where we’re from! But Texas is bigger.) As it is, I find the plant confusing and distracting from what I want from this flag, which is a reminder that Texas is bigger than France.
Ochiltree
Forrest: Yikes. Is it just me, or does the pump jack looks like a phallus?
Dan: Low-key maybe the most offensive desecration of the Texas flag.
Orange County
Dan: I love this, but if I were Irish, I can’t tell if I’d be psyched or pissed.
Forrest: I might have been on board if they had just replaced the lone star with the orange. But they couldn’t help themselves—they had to put the damn county outline in there too. Why? Nobody cares about the shape of your county, unless you’re Tom Green County, which has its own panhandle. And that should be celebrated.
Red River County
Forrest: Cooke County already tried this trick with the river. It doesn’t work. Come to think of it, doesn’t putting the Red River through your flag mean that half of it is in . . . Oklahoma?!
Dan: That checks out with my understanding of geography. Also, it’s absolutely bananas to me that this is not the only perversion of the Texas flag in which the red-and-white portion is replaced with a depiction of the Red River.
Sweeny
Forrest: The town slogan—“A City with Pride”—is somewhat undermined by this lazy and offensive version of the Texas flag.
Dan: That’s a great point. The people of Sweeny deserve better.
Terrell County
Dan: Oh no—it’s not even the Texas flag; it’s the Chilean flag.
Forrest: The 2007 Coen brothers film No Country for Old Men was set in Terrell County and featured a villain named Anton Chigurh, who killed his victims with a cattle stunner. I wonder if he had anything to do with this massacre.
Wise County
Forrest: Maybe one of the worst flags, if not THE worst, that wasn’t made by a kid. Just a total ruination of the Texas flag. Covers up the defining symbol of the state with a bad copy-and-paste job of the county courthouse and a hideous yellow background that is the visual equivalent of mixing broccoli with ice cream.
Dan: MS Paint is my passion.
Interlude: The Five Biggest Texas Cities, Ranked by Flag
Dallas
Dan: Easily the best of the big-city flags, in my opinion. Big and bold; feels like Dallas.
Forrest: You’re right. They really nailed it, but I’m like that guy who thinks every band’s first album was the best, the most authentic. Dallas’s original flag pennant is legend.
El Paso
Dan: This is how you do a city-seal flag right—it’s not exactly the seal, but the star is the same, and the imagery mirrors the seal without outright mimicking it. The blue-and-brown color scheme also looks surprisingly good, and I love the yellow border around the star. El Paso punches above its weight once again.
Forrest: This may be controversial, but I like that the designers went with a sensible Arial-type font. If you’re going to put text on your flag, don’t let it detract from the overall scheme.
Austin
Forrest: This flag has kind of an old-world vibe for such a new, buzzy city.
Dan: I’m curious about the genie’s lamp. Did they wish for traffic? Because the genie delivered.
Fort Worth
Forrest: Simple and powerful. Too bad the Texas Longhorns own the imagery.
Dan: Agreed. They should have put a panther on it.
Houston
Forrest: We have a problem. This thing is terribly dated. A plow?! A choo choo?
Dan: Agreed. They should have put Bun B on it.
Forrest: Or at least the Astrodome.
San Antonio
Forrest: This one’s disappointing, especially given how San Antonio has so much history to work with. Yes, they leaned into the Alamo, but this seems like a bad riff on the Texas and U.S. flags. There are no bars, and the star is too big, if only because it reduces the Alamo to a crude depiction. While it’s actually small in real life, the Alamo looms so much larger in the public imagination.
Dan: You’re right—the design makes the Alamo look smaller than it should, with all of the inner points of the star contracting around it. This Fiesta version of the flag hits better, I think.
Too Much Going On
Amarillo
Forrest: Green hills and a plane fleeing while a steer grows amid the wheat. Couldn’t Stanley Marsh 3 have commissioned something better?
Dan: I kind of like this one. The skull does it for me. I’m confused by the plane too, though. I guess now I know Amarillo has an airport.
Baytown
Forrest: Six symbols and a stack of stars that looks like an attempt at a flip-book animation job. The rare coastal city flop.
Dan: Oh, I’m super into this one. If it had been a Photoshop job, I’d agree with you, but I love the hand-drawn vibe to it. I wish they’d done “Baytown” by hand too.
Houston County
Forrest: There’s a lot going on here. The lone pine tree, the frenchification of the Texas flag, the county shape, the celebration of the sesquicentennial that has long come and gone. Oh, and the star in “Texas” is apparently meant as a reminder that the state got its name from “tejas,” a word used to describe the local Caddo Indians. How, exactly?
Dan: It makes me think that Houston County died in 1987. RIP.
Kingsville
Forrest: Six symbols!
Dan: This is the sort of busy mess that makes Baytown look cool.
San Marcos
Forrest: The individual tableaux are good, but this is a flag that needs to be studied to make sense of it, which is not what a flag should be. It’s more of a storybook than a flag.
Dan: Also kind of a misleading depiction of San Marcos life—at least one of those images in the grid should have a Texas State student puking in the bushes off the square.
Forrest: And where is Frisbee Dan, the most consequential San Martian since LBJ?
Goes Harder Than It Needs To
Goliad County
Dan: This is probably the most metal of all the flags here, including the one that has a two-headed eagle clutching a sword. It’s unofficial, but they’ve been flying it in Goliad since 1835, so I think it counts—and I’d note that that was 133 years before Black Sabbath was founded, so it’s possible the true origin of metal is in Goliad.
Forrest: I think the bloody arm flag—really, all the flags of the Texas Revolution, including, of course, the Gonzales “Come and Take It” banner—proves that modern Texas vexillologists are severely lacking in the boldness and creativity of their Texian predecessors. Good flags are born of revolution, not of city-sponsored contests and attempts at municipal branding. Today, if we let the average city council commission a flag for, say, the Battle of Gonzales, it would be a pixelated, neon-green squirt gun emblazoned with the phrase “Gonzales: Fighting for Your Quality of Life.”
Leon Valley
Dan: Leon Valley is a tiny little town that exists as sort of an island unto itself, surrounded on all sides by the city of San Antonio. It’s wild that it even has a flag, let alone one that looks this cool.
Forrest: My only complaint is that they should have had the puma facing the camera, maybe even baring his fangs. I like a flag that breaks the fourth wall.
Llano County
Forrest: There’s no record of this flag, featuring a crazed deer, ever being officially adopted. Which is too bad. Because that thing is a legend.
Dan: It was formally presented to the country commissioners in 1985, though they somehow failed to vote in favor of the flag for Bambi II: Bambi’s Mom’s Revenge. It’s never too late, Llano County!
Magnolia
Dan: This one doesn’t really work as a flag—the name gets lost in the train tracks, and the whole thing has a computer-design feel that contradicts the pastoral imagery of the magnolia flower—but I do respect it for including two swords. There’s a surprising dearth of swords on a lot of these things.
Forrest: This one is a train wreck.
Muenster
Dan: I’m surprised by how few Texas flags have heavy German vibes! Muenster, way up in North Texas, really went for it. I appreciate the oil rig and the windmill within the crest, bringing some common Texas flag elements into this one.
Forrest: An investigation by yours truly has discovered that Muenster’s flag has failed to keep the town from being riven by two competing German heritage festivals. Mein Gott, people, beer and brats should bring us together, not drive us apart.
Von Ormy
Dan: This is so metal. I am going to move to Von Ormy and adopt a two-headed eagle.
Forrest: True story—when you move there, they swear you in as a citizen by making you recite the town’s Latin motto while holding a sword. Anyway, I am thrilled to learn that this “liberty city”—a libertarian, small-government municipality with a hilariously disastrous history—has a flag to match. It was actually designed by the city’s founding father and former mayor, Art Martinez de Vara, who hates taxes and loves history. (The blue portion, with the star and “Texas,” is a nod to the reported first official flag of the Texas Republic, allegedly designed by General Lorenzo de Zavala.) “Libertas, Fides, et Familia”!
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