The flag of the Orange Free State

Orange Free State

The Orange Free State was an independent Boer republic in southern Africa during the second half of the 19th century, and later a British colony and a province of the Union of South Africa. It is the historical precursor to the present-day Free State province...

(1854–1902) was designed in 1856 and adopted officially on 23 February 1857 on the third anniversary of the republic.
The OFS flag was designed by King William III of the Netherlands

William III of the Netherlands

William III was from 1849 King of the Netherlands and Grand Duke of Luxembourg until his death and the Duke of Limburg until the abolition of the Duchy in 1866.-Early life:William was born in Brussels as son of William II of the Netherlands and...

 and (along with other flags of the era) is believed to have been loosely modeled on the United States national flag

Flag of the United States

The national flag of the United States of America consists of thirteen equal horizontal stripes of red alternating with white, with a blue rectangle in the canton bearing fifty small, white, five-pointed stars arranged in nine offset horizontal rows of six stars alternating with rows...

.

The OFS national flag contained alternating horizontal orange

Orange (colour)

The colour orange occurs between red and yellow in the visible spectrum at a wavelength of about 585–620 nm, and has a hue of 30° in HSV colour space. It is numerically halfway between red and yellow in a gamma-compressed RGB colour space, the expression of which is the RGB colour wheel. The...

 and white

White

White is a color, the perception of which is evoked by light that stimulates all three types of color sensitive cone cells in the human eye in nearly equal amounts and with high brightness compared to the surroundings. A white visual stimulation will be void of hue and grayness.White light can be...

 stripes (three orange and four white, with the white stripes on the outside) with a version of the Dutch flag

Flag of the Netherlands

The flag of the Netherlands is a horizontal tricolour of red, white, and blue. Since 1937, the flag has officially been the national flag of the Netherlands and of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.-Description:...

 (used initially by Boer

Boer

Boer is the Dutch and Afrikaans word for farmer, which came to denote the descendants of the Dutch-speaking settlers of the eastern Cape frontier in Southern Africa during the 18th century, as well as those who left the Cape Colony during the 19th century to settle in the Orange Free State,...

 republican movements at Graaff Reinet

Graaff Reinet

Graaff-Reinet is a town in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. It is the fourth oldest town in South Africa, after Cape Town, Stellenbosch and Swellendam.-History:...

 and Swellendam

Swellendam

Swellendam is the third oldest town in the Republic of South Africa, a town with 28,072 inhabitants situated in the Western Cape province. The town has over 50 National monuments most of them buildings of Cape Dutch architecture....

 in 1795) featured in the canton.

The former national flag of South Africa

Flag of South Africa

The current flag of the Republic of South Africa was adopted on 27 April 1994, at the beginning of the 1994 general election, to replace the flag that had been used since 1928...

(from 1927 to 1994) had, as a feature contained within its central white bar, a vertically hanging flag of the Orange Free State.