Stamps, Parks, and a President
Gallery
About this Gallery
At a cabinet meeting on March 9, 1934, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, together with James Farley, postmaster general, discussed a series of stamps to feature the national parks in the United States, and by March 29, they had a definite plan. In the next few weeks Arno B. Cammerer, appointed National Park Service director August 10, 1933, asked George Grant, chief photographer at NPS, to begin the process of selecting photographs from which artists would produce the designs and engravings for ten stamps. Grant and several associates selected ten parks to be featured on stamps ranging from one-cent to ten-cents. They were, in ascending order of stamp value: Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Mount Rainier, Mesa Verde, Yellowstone, Crater Lake, Acadia, Zion, Glacier, and Great Smoky Mountains. On May 16,1934, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing was directed to prepare sample designs for the first stamp—the one-cent Yosemite—based on the photograph selected by Grant and his group. On June 15, Farley selected one of several submitted designs. He approved the proof June 28, and printing began on July 6. Ten days later the stamp went on sale. The remaining nine were on similar schedules; the last stamp, the ten-cent Great Smoky Mountains, went on sale October 8.