New Jersey Facts & Symbols:

State Seal

• Pierre Eugene du Simitiere created New Jersey’s State Seal in 1777. It contains five symbols, each of which represents something about New Jersey.
  
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State Flag

• The New Jersey State Flag was adopted in 1896. Its official color is buff, which is a yellowish-tan color. The colors of the state flag, buff and dark blue (Jersey blue), were the colors George Washington chose for the flag of New Jersey’s army regiments during the Revolutionary War. The state seal is featured on the flag.

State Flower – The Violet

• Violets can be found in New Jersey fields, lawns, and meadows — anywhere that they can find warm spring sunshine.

State Bird – The Eastern Goldfinch

• The eastern goldfinch has bright yellow feathers and a black head and wings. Eastern goldfinches love to eat sunflower seeds.

State Tree – The Red Oak

• The red oak is a hardwood tree that has pointy-lobed leaves with prickly tips. In autumn its leaves turn a beautiful, bright red. It produces many acorns.

State Bug – The Honeybee

The honeybee makes honey for sweetening our meals and beeswax to smooth things out. Honeybees also pollinate our flowers, including our state flower, the violet.

State Animal – The Horse

• Michael McCarthy and his fifth grade class at Our Lady of Victories School in Harrington Park and James Sweetman, an eighth grader from Freehold, helped make the horse New Jersey’s state animal in 1977. The horse is included on the state seal. Horses were very important to farming. Today, people continue to raise horses in New Jersey. Race horses are also very popular in New Jersey.

State Fish- The Brook Trout

• The brook trout is native to New Jersey. If you find a brook trout, you know the water is good quality because brook trout can’t survive in polluted water.

State Shell – The Knobbed Whelk

• The knobbed whelk shell is commonly known as the conch shell. Found along NJ beaches and bays, the knobbed whelk is the name of the large marine snail that lives in the shell. Also known by its Italian name, scungilli, the snail is harvested from its spiral shell and canned for food. The shell is yellowish gray in color.

State Ship – The A.J. Meerwald

• The A.J. Meerwald is a Delaware Bay Oyster Schooner. It was originally built to meet the needs of New Jersey’s oyster fishing industry. The ship was built in 1928 in Dorchester, New Jersey.
  
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State Fruit – The Blueberry

• The blueberry, which was first cultivated in Whitesbog, became the official state fruit in 2004. In 2003, fourth graders at Veteran’s Memorial Elementary School in Brick campaigned to make the blueberry the official state fruit. The students had their idea introduced as legislation and conducted a lobbying campaign to see its passage, including media interviews, a letter and petition drive, presentations to local governing bodies, and a trip to the state’s blueberry festival in Whitesbog. In addition, the classes traveled to Trenton to make presentations before Senate and Assembly Committees. Elizabeth Coleman White developed the nation’s first cultivated blueberry.

State Dinosaur – Hadrosaurus foulkii

• In the summer of 1858, Victorian gentleman and fossil hobbyist William Parker Foulke was vacationing in Haddonfield, New Jersey, when he heard that twenty years previous, workers had found gigantic bones in a local marl pit. Foulke spent the the late summer and fall directing a crew of hired diggers shin deep in gray slime. Eventually he found the bones of an animal larger than an elephant with structural features of both a lizard and a bird.

State Dance – Square Dance

• The Square Dance has been designated as the American Folk Dance of the State of New Jersey by Joint Resolution No. 1, 1983.