The Eagle That Came Before the Arrowhead: Early National Park Service Emblems

Ask visitors to name a symbol of the national parks and most would picture the National Park Service arrowhead or a bison. Those have been NPS symbols for more than 70 years — but they weren't the first. The earliest emblem is still around, if you know where to look. This page draws on number 36 in the NPS series 50 Nifty Finds.

The Interior Department's eagle

The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) was created on March 3, 1849, and that year Edward Stabler of Sandy Springs, Maryland, designed its first official seal: an eagle with wings spread, looking left, clutching arrows and perched on a sheaf of wheat, encircled by the words "Department of the Interior" inside a rope border.

Top: the original 1849 Interior Department seal. Bottom: the first park ranger badge, issued by the department in 1906. NPS History Collection, HFCA 310.

That seal clearly inspired the first DOI-issued badge for park rangers, made in 1906, a decade before the NPS existed. The round, silver-plated badge kept the eagle looking left and clutching arrows, but swapped the wheat for two tree branches, added the words "National Park Service," and kept the rope border. Its designer is unknown, and the NPS History Collection holds only one.

Buttons still worn today

When the department authorized the first optional ranger uniform in 1911, it used U.S. Army buttons, at first unwilling to spend $28 on a special die "until the future of the national park service is definitely determined." It soon changed its mind. Around January 1912, Sigmund Eisner, head of a uniform company in Red Bank, New Jersey, met with DOI Chief Clerk Clement Ucker about buttons based on the badge. Eisner's company made the dies and in 1912 supplied enameled bronze buttons with the eagle design, manufactured by the Waterbury Button Company in Connecticut. Early buttons are stamped "Sigmund Eisner/Red Bank NJ" on the back; later ones carry both names, then only Waterbury's. In the 1930s the finish changed to oxidized bronze.

The DOI badge was replaced after the NPS was founded in 1916, but the buttons remain part of the uniform today — a direct link to the rangers of the past.

The first NPS emblem

The NPS's own first emblem was also an eagle. In 1916 Stephen T. Mather, then a special assistant to the secretary of the interior and soon the first NPS director, hired Robert Sterling Yard to produce the National Parks Portfolio, nine pamphlets meant to boost park tourism and build support for a parks bureau. Published in June 1916, two months before the NPS was created on August 25, it carried a new emblem on its back cover: an eagle perched on a rock with wings spread, looking left, over a forest with mountains beyond, ringed by "National Park Service" and "Department of the Interior."

The NPS eagle emblem from the National Parks Portfolio, 1916. NPS History Collection, HFCA 1645.

The artist is unknown, though Mather and probably Yard likely shaped the concept. The Portfolio is the only known printed use of the emblem. The DOI seal switched from an eagle to a bison in 1917, and the NPS probably dropped its eagle to match; the 1917 Portfolio, the first official NPS publication, left it out, and later publications used only the DOI seal until the 1950s.

A badge rediscovered

It was long thought that the eagle emblem sat unused until 1920, when it became the center of the new shield-shaped ranger badge. But records in the Tiffany Archives show that the first NPS-issued ranger badge was designed in 1916 with this same eagle — matching the small round badges seen in photographs from 1917 and 1918. These badges were probably first delivered in 1917, after the NPS received its first budget in April, and used until the shield badge arrived in 1920; because of shortages, some rangers wore the old DOI badges into the early 1920s.

An NPS badge with the 1916 eagle emblem. NPS History Collection, HFCA 1970.

From 1921 to 1960 the round eagle badge, in silver and gold, marked directors, superintendents and other officers, and badges with the symbol were used until 1968 — keeping the eagle part of the agency's identity for more than 50 years.

Sources

• National Park Service: "50 Nifty Finds #36: Taking Flight."
• Sources it cites: Assembled Historic Records of the NPS (HFCA 1645), NPS History Collection; Workman, R. Bryce. National Park Service Uniforms: Badges and Insignia (1991).
• The source places the Waterbury Button Company in "Waterford, Connecticut"; this page names only the state.