FORTISVEX 25 Star U.S. Flag 4x6 Feet Nylon - Made in USA with Brass Grommets

25 Star U.S. Flag History

The twenty-five-star flag records a short but distinct chapter in the expansion of the United States. Arkansas became the twenty-fifth state on June 15, 1836. The new star entered the national flag that July 4, and the twenty-five-star period continued until July 3, 1837. The U.S. Senate’s Arkansas timeline documents the admission date. The July transition follows the 1818 rule for adding statehood stars, which left the stripe count at thirteen.

Arkansas’s journey to statehood began well before this one-year flag period. The region came within the United States through the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Congress subsequently separated Arkansas Territory from Missouri Territory in 1819, giving it its own territorial government. Statehood replaced that territorial status with membership in the Union and representation in Congress. Arkansas’s first two senators, William S. Fulton and Ambrose H. Sevier, presented their credentials and took office in December 1836, during the twenty-five-star era. These steps are recorded in the Senate’s account of Arkansas’s early federal history.

The Arkansas State Archives preserves the 1836 constitution produced during the push for admission. That document helps explain what a new star represented: not simply a newly settled place, but a political change from a territory to a state with its own constitutional government. President Andrew Jackson signed the admission act after the statehood campaign and congressional deliberation.

The twenty-five-star design represents the national Union rather than Arkansas alone. It should be understood as a historical star-count flag, rather than an exact copy of a documented flag carried at a particular event. The unchanged thirteen stripes connect this expanding nation with the original states. Its brief place in the sequence makes it a useful marker between Missouri’s long twenty-four-star period and Michigan’s addition in 1837.

Michigan’s admission on January 26, 1837, supplied the next star. The Senate’s Michigan chronology confirms that date, which preceded the next official flag change by several months.

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