Green River Flag
Fall 2016
Ashley Ross & Jarod Hamm
Examples of community survey responses.
Travis Bacon and Gayna Salinas discussing the flag design at the downtown workshop.
Frontier Fellow Ashley Ross and AmeriCorps VISTA Jarod Hamm worked together with the community to create a flag for Green River. While a city logo provides a face for the local government and marketing campaigns work to attract outsiders, a flag gives the community itself a symbol to rally behind and a tangible way to show civic pride. Green River has had banners and flag proposals in the past, but no community flag has ever existed until now.
They began by surveying residents and researching town history, learning what symbols, colors, and shapes were representative of Green River’s past, present, and future. With this information in mind they sketched, refined, sketched some more, and presented 20 rough options to community members at a design workshop for the city’s downtown plan.
From the community feedback, three finalists were designed and a voting booth was created to determine the winner during the week of Melon Days, an over 100-year festival celebrating the melon harvest. One option was the overwhelming favorite among Green River locals and visitors to Melon Days with over 60% of the vote.
Earlier in the month, Jarod visited two of Mrs. Suarez' Green River High School sewing classes to teach about flag symbolism, design, and history. Students designed flags to represent each of their respective families based on the principles outlined in class. They then made the flags by hand as an introduction to basic sewing, and displayed them next to the voting booth at Melon Days.
Local resident Julie Steuer mans the voting booth during Melon Days. Students flags on display in the background.
When consulting with the community, it was very clear that their flag should include watermelon which has a longstanding tradition in Green River's agricultural history, and the Book Cliffs that define the town landscape. The flag begins with a meandering green stripe to represent the titular river and also pay homage to the famous Green River melons. It flows below a dusty red-orange silhouette of the iconic Book Cliffs. When we look above, big blue skies are represent not only Green River's climate, but also its outlook. The star is split by the crossroads of river, rail, and road, referencing the town's identity as a waypoint, and the sections radiating from the center also give tribute the missile base of the past.
This is just the beginning of the journey for our flag, and we hope that residents of Green River will be proud to fly it high.
The Green River Community Flag
