It’s campfire season here at the Department, and whether you’re burning barrels full of confidential documents or old office furniture full of asbestos, it’s important to practice fire safety. We’ve enlisted our newly minted Information Ambassador, Pokey the Pigeon, to dig through the U.S. Forest Service Smokey Bear Collection at the USDA National Agricultural Library to bring us some of the best vintage Smokey Bear posters out there. As required by the U.S. Forest Service’s copyright rules, we are letting you know that our intentions here are strictly in the service of fire prevention.
We’ll link to the source pages for each of these in their respective captions, so viewers can bask in the full resolution glory within the safe legal confines of the National Agricultural Library’s proprietary and secretive Universal Viewer portal, where you can zoom in really close to Smokey.
Take care with each plant that you find to eat. Don’t pull it up by the roots. Pick the leaves carefully, and leave it to grow. And remember to be careful with fire. Only you can prevent forest fires.
A lot of these are undated but the archive implies they are all from between the 1930s and 1980s.
Smokey, who was based on a real-life bear, is surprisingly not always the focus of many of these posters. Instead, the forest itself, along with beautiful illustrations of flowers, plants, and other creatures, is centered as the core subject.
The Teresa Woodward puzzle poster from 1985 is pretty wild. It reads: “You already know that trees are fun to climb. But did you know that we also get thousands of products from trees? Products you probably use every day, like the paper and ink it took to make this puzzle. Cut out the pieces and put them together to see what else we get from trees. It should look like the one at the right. But remember, the only way we can have these things is if we’re all careful with fire in the forest”.
A lot of these are from the same “Think” series which appears to be some kind of continuous theme or thread on the campaigns throughout the years. They are some of the more typographically thoughtful pieces in the collection.
Why be careful with fire in the forest? Pick a reason.
We’ve posted just a few of our favorites here but we encourage you to check out the whole collection of vintage posters at the USDA National Agricultural Library.
Additionally, there is an entire library of films of public service announcements promoting Smokey Bear’s fire prevention message, live footage of Smokey Bear at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., and more at the USDA Smokey Bear Films Archive.
