Lansing's flag carries its seal on a pale field: the Capitol dome, the state emblems, the restraint of an administrative capital. It speaks of the institution. It says nothing of the accident, or the engine.
The accident first. In 1847, Michigan wanted to move its capital away from Detroit, judged too exposed to British Canada. The legislators, unable to agree, ended up choosing, almost in derision, a township lost in the forest, home to fewer than twenty people. Lansing became a capital before it was a city: the state was built around an empty point on the map.
It was here, in 1897, that Ransom E. Olds founded Oldsmobile, then the REO Motor Car Company. Before Detroit reigned, Lansing was one of the cradles of the American automobile, the first mass-produced car was born here.
A capital born of chance, a forgotten mother of the automobile: Lansing has two stories its flag tucks behind a dome. The seal flies, calm and administrative, above a city that invented far more than it shows.