South Carolinians mock redesigned palmetto tree on proposed state flag

The goal was to come up with a standard design for the South Carolina state flag, one that residents could rally around, fly from their porches or proudly display on T-shirts, mugs and hats. But a proposed redesign of the beloved palmetto tree on the flag hasn’t exactly made hearts swell with state pride.

One person said it resembled a toilet bowl brush. Others said it looked like one of the palmettos battered by Hurricane Hugo in 1989. Still others compared it to the forlorn little Christmas tree from the 1965 television classic “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

Scott Malyerck, a political consultant who helped create the design as a member of the South Carolina State Flag Study Committee, said with some understatement that the tree had “not been uniformly loved by all South Carolinians.”

“I’ve read hundreds of comments,” he said, adding that everyone seemed to have an opinion. “It’s hard to come up with a quintessential palmetto tree that everyone will be in favor of.”

The panel met for the first time in 2018 and delivered its final recommendations in March, but the redesigned palmetto didn’t gain broad attention until recently when The Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina, reported on the design and was inundated with complaints that the tree was “horrible” and “terrible!”

“As it turns out, people hate it,” the newspaper reported. “They really, really hate it.”

Ronnie W. Cromer, a state senator who helped create the flag study committee, said that as a result of the blowback, he planned to ask the committee members, who had worked with historians and graphic designers, to create a more appealing palmetto to properly represent the state.

“I can’t say it was the most beautiful design I have ever seen,” Cromer said. “It would be nice to have a little nicer-looking tree.”

The proposed redesign was bound to stir up passions in South Carolina, given the popularity of the palmetto, the official state tree, on clothing, beach towels and other goods, Malyerck said.

The panel said the South Carolina flag — which also features a blue background and a crescent — was “one of the most attractive, recognizable, and marketable state flags in the nation.”

The panel didn’t want to alter the flag’s traditional symbols but felt it was necessary to come up with a standard version because the state has not had one official design for the flag since 1940, when the flag code was repealed.

As a result, the panel said, flag manufacturers have been producing their own versions, each with slight differences in the color, layout and shape of the symbols.

“The idea is just to make it historically accurate and uniform,” Malyerck said. “Flag manufacturers should not decide what it should look like.”

To come up with its recommendations, the panel delved deeply into South Carolina history and vexillology, the study of flags.

The panel chose a particular indigo for the background after noting that the officers of the 2nd South Carolina Regiment, commanded by Col. William Moultrie during the Revolutionary War, wore uniforms of that color.

Those blue uniforms also inspired Moultrie to create the first South Carolina flag using the same color, the panel said. Indigo dye, cultivated in the South Carolina low country at the time of the Revolution, made blue a logical choice.

In designing the crescent, the committee examined period examples on Moultrie’s flag, as well as crescent-shaped badges worn on Revolutionary War caps.

But the panel acknowledged that “perhaps the most difficult task that the committee has faced in its work has been the adoption of an appropriate and historic palmetto to appear on the flag.”

The palmetto is a revered symbol of the defeat of the British fleet at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island. The fort was built of palmetto logs, which absorbed the impact of cannon balls, according to the state Legislature’s website.

Ultimately, the committee based its design for the tree on a 1910 pencil sketch by Ellen Heyward Jervey, an artist and librarian from Charleston, who provided drawings of crescents and palmettos that were used by a state official, A.S. Salley, to design the state flag that year.

“We wanted her to have the credit,” said W. Eric Emerson, the director of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, who served on the panel. “This is the same time the 19th Amendment was being passed. This was a woman who contributed her efforts to the creation of the South Carolina state flag and got no credit for it.”

But Emerson said that Jervey’s sketch proved difficult to translate into a palmetto tree “that looks similar to what people are used to.”

“So that’s how we ended up with what we had,” he said.

Cromer said that the public had spoken and that changes would have to be made.

“We listened to our constituents,” he said, “and we’re going back to the drawing board on that tree.”