A proposed flag for the Village of Arlington Heights, Illinois
Light blue over prairie green, split on the diagonal by two white rails. The village grew up around a train stop, so the flag is the track.
Arlington Heights is here because William Dunton wanted the train.
In the early 1850s the Illinois & Wisconsin Railroad was building northwest out of Chicago. Dunton talked the company into bending the route a little west so it would cross his land. The line they surveyed went right through his living room, so he moved the house. He had wanted to call the place Bradley, but somebody else in Illinois had already used it, and the stop went on the timetable as Dunton.
Farms around the depot were soon sending milk and vegetables into the city by train. The first shops went up along the tracks on Campbell Street. In 1874 the town became Arlington Heights; according to a 1987 piece in Illinois Issues, real estate developers talked the voters into it because they thought Arlington would sell better. The railroad changed names a couple of times too. The trains kept running.
| 1853 | Dunton sells 16 acres to the Illinois & Wisconsin for $350. |
| 1854 | The first depot opens. The stop is called Dunton. |
| 1859 | The line is reorganized as the Chicago & North Western. |
| 1874 | Dunton becomes Arlington Heights. |
| 1887 | The village incorporates. |
| Today | Metra's Union Pacific Northwest line, on the same right-of-way, through the middle of downtown. |
The diagonal runs the way the track runs on a map, coming in from Chicago at the lower right and heading off to the upper left, toward Palatine and everything past it. Anybody who has taken the train downtown from here knows which way that is without having to think about it.
The color changes at the upper rail, which leaves green in the gap. That gap is the right-of-way, the strip of ground the line was laid on in 1854, when all of this was open prairie. It keeps the track on the ground, too. An earlier draft split the colors down the middle of the rails, and the flag looked torn in half.
The green is the prairie, and the farms that loaded the first trains. The blue is the sky over it. It's also, on purpose, the blue of the Chicago flag, since this town has always been tied to the city at the other end of the line. Any print shop can match both.
The rails are two plain lines. I left off the ties, and there's no locomotive. Two parallel lines still read as track on a lapel pin. Add much more and it starts reading as a railroad crossing sign.
The flag at Village Hall today is the village seal on a white field, with "The City of Good Neighbors" across the top in gold. The seal itself is fine. It belongs on letterhead and on the side of a public works truck. Put it on a pole, though, and from the sidewalk you see a white sheet with a small circle in the middle.
Here are both flags at a few sizes, down to a lapel pin.
Current flag redrawn as a sketch from the Flags of the World image, for comparison at size.
The North American Vexillological Association publishes a short guide called Good Flag, Bad Flag. Chicago's flag passes it, and has since 1917. Minnesota's new flag was built around it in 2024. This one passes too.
A third grader can draw this from memory with a green crayon and a blue one.
Everything on it is either the railroad or the ground the railroad crossed.
Blue and green, with white for the rails.
There aren't any. The seal can stay on the stationery.
It's related to Chicago through the blue and through the direction it points. Nothing else in the northwest suburbs looks like it.
Seven towns border Arlington Heights. Two of them got new flags in 2025 that skip the seal and the lettering. Neither one is great.
A red bar across a white field, with a red wagon wheel sitting on it. The village worked it out with Cook County Commissioner Scott Britton, who is an amateur vexillologist. The bar stands for travel, rail included, so it's a distant cousin of the Northwest Line. The wheel is where it goes wrong. Each of its eight spokes means a different piece of village history, and at pin size the whole thing turns into a red smudge.
See it on Flags of the WorldDark green with a white mark in the middle, a stack of wavy bands that are supposed to be waves and hills. It went up in the council chamber in May 2025, after a rebrand the year before. That's a logo on a field and it looks a little corporate. You can still pick it out across a parking lot, which is more than most of its neighbors manage.
See it on Flags of the World| Town | Direction | What it flies |
|---|---|---|
| Palatine | West | No flag at all, according to the village in 2009. |
| Buffalo Grove | North | A buffalo emblem from its 2024 rebrand. The older flag put a buffalo inside a ring of leaves. |
| Prospect Heights | East | The city logo on white, with its incorporation date. |
| Mount Prospect | Southeast | The village seal. |
| Elk Grove Village | South | The village logo in white on green, with "The Exceptional Community" lettered around it. |
Go a little wider and the Chicago area has some good flags. Almost all of them are new. A lot of them were drawn by kids, which probably says something, though I'm not sure what.
The city ran a contest and a first grader at Dawes Elementary won it. It's Evanston seen from above, with green trees running down to a yellow strip of beach and the lake past it, and a white star for the Grosse Point lighthouse. Same map-thinking as the Northwest Line, from a higher altitude.
See it on Flags of the WorldThe one worth looking at hardest. It's maroon, with a wavy blue stripe for the Illinois & Michigan Canal and limestone-colored ripples in the middle. An eighth grader designed it for his Eagle Scout project, with notes from a NAVA member, and the council approved it in October 2024. One town drawing the single piece of infrastructure it grew up around. That's the whole idea here.
See it on Flags of the WorldRed, with a gold sun made out of a windmill sitting over blue and white waves for the Fox River. The town used to build windmills and called itself the Windmill City. A Batavia High student won the contest. The mayor proclaimed it in 2023, and the council got around to making it official in May 2025.
See it on Flags of the WorldA small village nearly at the Wisconsin line, with a flag that's better than most of Cook County's. A green panel at the hoist holds a gold tree, and a blue river winds across the white. A third grader at Richmond Grade School drew the original for the village's 150th birthday.
See it on Flags of the WorldFox River Grove's centennial flag, also by an eighth grader, is a blue saltire over white and green with a fox's head on a shield in the center. The shield is the weak spot. It still beats a seal by a lot.
The racetrack. Arlington Park was part of this town for almost a hundred years and closed in 2021. Whatever ends up on that land, the flag shouldn't have to change with it.
Frontier Days, and clasped hands for "Good Neighbors." Both are nice. Draw them on a flag, though, and they could be from anywhere.
The heights. The village took the name in 1874 for a rise most people have never noticed driving up Arlington Heights Road. Everybody here knows that already.
The flag is for flagpoles. Letterhead and squad car doors need a seal, and a seal is the right place for lettering.
This one puts the flag inside a ring. The village name runs across the top, and the bottom says Illinois and 1887, the year it incorporated. On each side there's a small open ring, the mark for a station stop on a rail map. It's the same mark the timetable up top uses for the stops. The letters are set in Big Shoulders, a typeface originally drawn for the City of Chicago.
The one-color version is for rubber stamps and embossers. Its sky is drawn as horizontal lines, because in the old engravers' system for showing color in black and white, horizontal hatching means blue.
Proportions are 2:3. The flag is drawn on a grid 200 units tall and 300 wide, around a reference diagonal from the top of the hoist to the bottom of the fly. Measured straight up and down, each rail is 11 units deep and the green between them is 22. Green fills everything below the upper rail.
The whole flag is four shapes. Here's the master SVG if you want to paste it somewhere.
Or take the files. Everything here is free to use.
