The Flag a Fourteen-Year-Old Orphan Drew

Cedar Valley News
June 25, 2026
The Flag a Fourteen-Year-Old Orphan Drew
By Chloe Papadakis

Last month, I ran a small contest for the children of Cedar Valley. We are decorating Main Street for the Fourth, and instead of buying banners, I asked the schools to have the kids design them. I expected a few dozen entries. We got more than two hundred. They are taped across the whole wall of my office right now, every one of them, because I cannot bring myself to take a single one down.

Choosing among them is the hardest part of my job. Every drawing is somebody’s whole heart, handed across a table to a stranger, hoping. You learn, doing this work, how asking a child to make something is no small thing. It is a kind of trust. You are telling them their hands matter.

I have been thinking, this week, about a contest like mine, held almost a hundred years ago, with much higher stakes.

In 1927, the Territory of Alaska did not have a flag. The governor decided the children should make one. The American Legion sent the rules to every school from the coast to the Interior: grades seven through twelve, design a flag for Alaska. Local judges picked the best, and the finalists went to Juneau. More than a hundred designs came in. Most were what you would expect from grown-up instincts handed to kids: polar bears, gold pans, the midnight sun.

The one they chose was the simplest. Eight gold stars on a field of blue. Seven of them, the Big Dipper, for strength. The eighth, the North Star, for the future of a place hoping to become a state. The boy who drew it wrote a sentence to explain the blue. It was, he said, for the Alaska sky and the forget-me-not, a small wild flower, the kind which blooms where almost nothing else will.

His name was Benny Benson. He was fourteen, though for most of the next century people believed he was thirteen, because he was an orphan and the records of his life were so thin even his birthday had to be corrected, by historians, almost a hundred years later.

He was an Alaska Native boy, Unangax̂, from a village on the Aleutian chain. His mother had died when he was small. His family lost their house to a fire. His father, unable to keep his children, sent Benny and his brother to a home for orphans. He was living there, with almost nothing of his own, when he picked up a pencil and drew the night sky he looked at every evening before he slept.

The territory adopted his flag in May. When Alaska became a state in 1959, the boy’s design became the state’s. In 1969, it flew to the moon. Benny lived to see it, and said, later, it was the biggest thing ever to happen to him. A flag a fourteen-year-old orphan drew at a small wooden desk, carried up off the earth entirely.

I learned all of this because of where the flag is going next.

This summer, for the country’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday, every state was asked to put one thing into a capsule, to be sealed in Philadelphia and opened in the year 2276. States sent coins. They sent letters from governors. One sent a piece of a fusion reactor.

Alaska sent a copy of Benny Benson’s flag.

Out of everything Alaska could have chosen to say to the people of the future, it chose the drawing of an orphaned boy. Not the oil, not the gold, not the mountains. The thing a child made when somebody thought to ask him.

So here is what I will be thinking about on the Fourth, watching all two hundred banners flap above Main Street, none of them taken down. We spend a great deal of energy deciding which grown-ups get to speak for us. We forget, most of the time, to ask the children to make anything at all.

When we remember, they hand it back with both hands. And every so often, one of them hands back the very thing we turn out to need for the next hundred years.

Ask them. You never know whose flag you are holding.

Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Tell us about something a child in your life made which you have never been able to take down. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, Benny Benson and his 1927 Alaska flag design are real, and a copy of it is Alaska’s contribution to America’s Time Capsule, to be sealed in Philadelphia on July 4, 2026, and opened in 2276.

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