July 16, 1790: How Washington, D.C. Was Founded

Washington, D.C. is not a state, and it has no admission date the way the fifty states do. Its founding traces instead to July 16, 1790, when President George Washington signed the Residence Act, authorizing a permanent federal capital on the Potomac River.

Establishing the District

The Constitution, ratified the year before, called for a federal district under the exclusive control of Congress, separate from any state. The Residence Act put that into practice: Maryland and Virginia ceded land along the Potomac, and Washington himself selected the exact site, a square ten miles on a side. Philadelphia served as a temporary capital for the decade it took to build the new one. The District of Columbia Organic Act of 1801, signed by President John Adams on February 27, 1801, formally organized the territory under Congress and dissolved the earlier Board of Commissioners that had managed it.

For most of its history, the capital had no flag of its own. That changed in 1938, when Congress created the District Flag Commission to settle the question. The design chosen, submitted by artist Charles A.R. Dunn, is an armorial banner: three red five-pointed stars above two horizontal red bars on a white field, drawn directly from the coat of arms of George Washington's family, documented in England as far back as the 14th century and used privately by Washington himself at Mount Vernon. Congress adopted it on October 15, 1938.

The Flag Itself

A common myth holds that the three stars represent the three branches of government. They don't. They are mullets, a heraldic term, lifted straight from a five-hundred-year-old English coat of arms that predates the United States entirely. The flag's meaning is genealogical, not civic: it points at one family, not at the structure of government.

Shop District of Columbia flags in every outdoor size, nylon and two-ply polyester, made in the United States.

Statehood and the Flag

Because D.C. residents have no voting representation in Congress, the question of D.C. statehood has been a live one for decades. D.C. voters approved a 2016 referendum favoring statehood by a wide margin, and the House of Representatives passed a statehood bill in 2021 that did not advance in the Senate. Whatever comes of that debate, the flag adopted in 1938 remains the district's own, flown at its buildings and events regardless of its political status.

The full list of every state's admission date is on our state birthdays page.