The “WPA park posters” came from an NPS art factory, the Western Museum Laboratories

The WML printing room, August 1938. Grand Teton National Park posters wait on the table for the next color. NPS History Collection.

The silkscreen posters of Yosemite, Zion, Glacier and other parks, reproduced today, are usually called "the WPA park posters." That is not quite right. Between 1938 and 1941 the National Park Service's own Western Museum Laboratories (WML) in Berkeley made them, and the source says they should rightfully be called the WML posters. New research shows more designs than previously thought, including several previously unknown, and the artist long credited with most of them, C. Don Powell, has not been confirmed as their designer.

Why silkscreen

In 1936 the centuries-old silkscreen process was refined for mass production, giving multicolored posters faster and more cheaply than painting by hand. Stencils mask the areas that should stay blank, a rubber squeegee pushes oil paint through the silk stretched on a hinged frame, one color goes on every card, then the next stencil follows. The WML explained its six-color process at a July 1939 exhibit in Washington, DC: preliminary design, the finished design in color, cutting the stencil, applying it, registering the card in the press, and running the color and stacking the cards in a rack.

The 1939 exhibit display of the silkscreen steps. NPS History Collection.

An art department on relief labor

From 1925 to 1937 the NPS Field Division of Education made exhibits for park museums in Berkeley; in April 1937 it became the WML under Dorr G. Yeager, which used New Deal funding to hire craftspeople and artists through the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the National Youth Administration (NYA). In August 1938 Yeager wrote that parks were asking for so many hand-lettered posters that the lab could not keep up, so it had put in silkscreen printing to make them in large quantities. The first sample posters were a generic type with slots for dates and subjects of hikes and talks; many later park posters carried a white block reading "This Space Reserved for Schedule."

Some of the first WML posters offered to parks, 1938. NPS History Collection.

A hundred posters cost $12, only 12 cents each, which made them an affordable way for a park to advertise its programs.

Who designed them?

Nobody signed the posters. The WML's reports mention only "man hours" for the WPA, CCC and NYA, not names. Three names came up in the 1990s from the artists' families: Elmer Duffield, Dale Miller and Chester Don Powell. Lorenzo Moffett, a CCC-funded museum preparatory artist, managed the Art Department but was better known for sculpture. On a few posters the border of the stylized Interior Department seal holds letters: "EM" on both Yellowstone posters, "DM" on the Lassen one.

C. Don Powell has long been credited as the principal designer, but that is now in doubt:

• Personnel records show he could not have worked on at least seven of the posters. He was making dioramas when the Grand Teton, Grand Canyon and Wind Cave posters came out in August, November and December 1938, and the Great Smoky Mountains, Petrified Forest, Bandelier and Rocky Mountain posters came after he was let go on August 15, 1939 under a rule against employing anyone continuously for more than 18 months.
• The photos of him at the drafting table in the 1939 exhibit were likely staged: the preliminary sketch on his table for the Old Faithful poster was not started until June 1939, while the Yosemite and Yellowstone Falls posters were already finished in April, and the exhibit photo was taken June 23, 1939.
• The Old Faithful poster, most often attributed to him because he kept a copy, was printed in September and October 1939, after he left; its "EM" initials suggest someone else designed it.

His son recalled that he worked on the silkscreen posters and the drying racks, so the likeliest picture is that he was a model maker, artist, printer and mentor in turn. Photographs show Powell at the press showing Dale Miller how to print the Yosemite poster in April 1939, and Miller, whose initials may be on the Lassen poster, may have designed it or colored its design. Elmer Duffield's 1940 census entry lists him as an NPS printer, but that does not prove he printed these posters.

Powell at the drafting board, a photo that may have been staged for the 1939 exhibit. NPS History Collection.

How many park posters?

Researchers long believed the series held 14 designs for 13 parks, from photos taken May 5, 1940. The WML's monthly reports add one or perhaps two more, Rocky Mountain National Park and Saguaro National Monument, for a total of 15 or 16, and the real number is higher because many posters were printed both with and without the white schedule block. A November 1940 proposal cited 40 "preliminary designs for park posters."

The WML's Grand Canyon poster, November 1938. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The WML's Zion poster, February-March 1939. NPS History Collection.

Several designs echo the lab's own park dioramas and the 1934 national park postage stamps; the Great Smoky Mountains, Zion and Yosemite posters and Old Faithful look much like their stamps. The "WPA-CCC" mark appears on some posters, and the Interior Department seal on them was probably simplified because the stencils could not reproduce its detail.

Not only park posters

The WML also printed thousands of other posters in the same years, in other styles: 3,600 for Wildlife Week in three designs for the NPS and the Bureau of Biological Survey, ski warnings, and many fire prevention posters such as "Paradise Lost," a charred forest against a fire-orange sky, of which 500 were finished in October 1940. Only one, a "Paradise Lost," is known to survive, in a private collection. The "WPA style" now tied to the Park Service was just one of the styles used in that three-year period.

The end

A January 1939 law forced WPA workers off after 18 months. From 1940 the lab lost staff to defense work in shipyards and aircraft plants. By mid-1941 Yeager wrote that he felt he was about to write a death notice: from as many as two to three hundred workers at times, the staff dwindled to one museum artist, two stenographers, two CCC enrollees and himself. The WPA project officially ended on July 29, 1941.

Why so few survive

Only about 40 park posters and a couple of others are known to survive. That is typical: New Deal poster programs are estimated to have printed over two million posters from 35,000 designs, and only about 2,000 survive. These were cheap, short-lived notices for ranger programs, faded on display, and were thrown away or cut up. After the war the NPS turned to modernizing, and a poster program only resumed in 1968. Silkscreen reproductions of the 14 documented park posters appeared in the 1990s, and the "WPA style" has since spread to calendars, mugs and the NPS's own designs. The NPS History Collection's archivist would like to hear from anyone who owns a WML poster.

Sources

• National Park Service, 50 Nifty Finds #39, An NPS Art Factory; the personal biographies of the artists and the long source list are left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.