From cobalt porcelain to wartime tin cans

By Timothy Page

Vermont’s license plates have changed steadily since the first cars appeared on the state’s roads, moving from fragile porcelain tags to the sturdy green plates that feel like part of the landscape. Most shifts happened for practical reasons—making plates easier to identify, stronger, cheaper, or safer to read at night—while the lasting green color grew into a quiet symbol of the Green Mountain State.

The earliest plates arrived in 1905, not long after Vermont’s first registration law took effect. Those tags were white numbers on a dark blue porcelain background and carried the words “Vermont Automobile Register.” The dark blue color was not a unique Vermont choice. The plates were manufactured by the Baltimore Enamel & Novelty Company and deliberately modeled after the pioneering Massachusetts “Automobile Register” plates that had been in use since 1903. Massachusetts, the first state to issue official license plates, used the same white-on-dark-blue porcelain design. At the time, cobalt-based blue pigments bonded especially well to the metal and held up against weather, making dark blue a practical manufacturing choice for early enamel plates. Because the Vermont version looked nearly identical to its Massachusetts counterpart, drivers and officials quickly ran into confusion. Lawmakers responded in late 1906 by ordering a clear break: black numbers on a plain white field with the letters “VT.” The new plates arrived in 1907. You can follow the official timeline on the Vermont DMV history page and see the Massachusetts connection documented in collector and historical accounts.

Porcelain gave way to pressed steel in 1916. From then on the Secretary of State could choose new colors each year as long as the numbers stood out clearly against the background. Some years skipped the date entirely because the color change itself signaled a fresh registration. Early steel plates ran through a wide range of combinations—white on dark blue, blue on white, yellow on green, and more—before sizes settled closer to the modern 6-by-12-inch standard in the mid-1920s and the full word “VERMONT” replaced the abbreviation “VT.”

Production moved inside the state prison in 1935, a practice that continues today at Vermont Correctional Industries in Windsor. World War II metal shortages forced temporary fixes: drivers often received small tabs, sometimes cut from recycled food cans, to revalidate older plates. Aluminum replaced steel in 1947.

The green that defines Vermont plates today took hold in the late 1940s. In 1948 the state added its first slogan, “Green Mountains,” and issued gold numbers on a dark green background. Officials had planned black and white, but the new slogan apparently inspired the switch. The familiar green-and-white pairing began the next year and has remained the core look ever since. A well-known story credits Governor George Aiken with suggesting the color. He later recalled pointing to the green hills visible from the State House steps around 1937 and recommending that shade. Aiken even claimed federal highway planners later copied the high-contrast green-and-white combination for interstate signs. The permanent green plates line up more closely with 1948–49 in official records, yet the anecdote helps explain why the color stuck. The full story appears in this White River Valley Herald article.

Later decades refined the design for safety and convenience. In 1957 Vermont adopted the national standard size and introduced the tourism slogan “SEE VERMONT.” Reflective sheeting arrived with the 1967 plates so numbers would glow at night; the green also shifted to a brighter shade, and characters became debossed rather than raised. Multi-year plates validated by stickers replaced the old annual reissue system. The slogan “SEE VERMONT” came and went, “Green Mountains” returned for a stretch, and “Green Mountain State” finally settled in.

The base design still used today debuted around 1985: a green field, white characters inside a white rectangular box, a small sugar maple leaf in the upper left corner, “Vermont” across the top, and “Green Mountain State” along the bottom. Serial formats evolved from pure numbers to letter-number combinations and settled into the current ABC 123 style by 1990. A detailed year-by-year visual record of these design changes is available on the Wikipedia page for Vermont plates.

In 2023 the state eliminated validation stickers altogether. Specialty plates for veterans, conservation causes, and community programs have multiplied since the 1990s, yet most keep the same green foundation. Through more than a century of adjustments, the plates have remained practical tools that also quietly reflect Vermont’s landscape and identity.

Editor’s note: I came to this topic in an unusual way, listening to random spooky accounts from Vermont on Youtube. A contributor submitted a story in which they were confused by seeing blue Vermont plates on a vehicle. One thing led to another, and I ended up in a rabbit hole.