Arlington Settles on County Seal
Standard Adopted After Much Debate

By Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 10, 2007; VA03

Arlington County officials adopted a new county "great seal" this week, featuring the iconic columns of Gen. Robert E. Lee's Arlington House on a field of Arlington Blue with white dogwood blossoms floating across the bottom.

Well, it's not really new.

The seal has been around in one form or another for four decades. And that was the problem, officials said -- there were too many versions of the seal. Some left the flowers out. In some, the flowers were yellow. Some seals were black, others green. And some had a Fourth of July feel, with red interspersed among the columns.

"For all these years, our seal has lain there tattered and defiled," said Mary Curtius, a spokeswoman for the county. "People have ripped it asunder. It was a mess. A horrible mess."

And an emotional one.

So much so that when county graphic designers proposed to clean up the seal, insisting, for instance, that only Arlington Blue be used, or that the letters be enlarged and the roofline of the Arlington portico be better defined, they put their proposal on the county's Web site and accepted public comment for 60 days.

And comment people did. Eighty-one of them.

Some liked it: "More distinct and sharp in design."

Others wanted changes, such as removal of the veins from the dogwood leaves. The veins were eliminated.

And others left messages such as this: "I am glad to know that we don't have bigger problems."

The saga of the seal began in 1983, when officials conducted a contest for a design for a county flag.

Harvey Wilcox was eating lunch at the Pentagon when he took out a pencil, drew his idea on a napkin and sent it in. County officials liked it so much that they chose it not only as the winner of the flag contest -- to be flown on a background of a "pale cheery yellow" -- but as the official county seal.

That's when the problems began. "People would change it -- take away the words, put in their department name. They'd add pictures to it," said Diana Sun, who spent months researching the history of the seal for the county and came up with the proposed standard. "It just wasn't right."

And don't get her started on what she called the "controversial" use of the date 1801.

For a while, 1801, the year the boundaries for the District of Columbia were drawn that defined the current Arlington County, was on the seal. But in the classic "Arlington Way," by which everyone has opinions and gets to share them, many thought the date should be 1847, when the county, then called Alexandria County, was retroceded to Virginia from the District. Or 1870, when the county was separated from the city of Alexandria. Or 1920, when the county of Alexandria officially became the county of Arlington, named after Lee's house.

Oy vey.

There is no date on the seal.

Furor over the seal had died down by the time Sun arrived in 2003 as the county's director of communications and began working to standardize the seal.

Until the logo.

When the county adopted a snazzy, modern take on Arlington House's columns a few years ago as a marketing tool, some Arlingtonians were upset that the logo was replacing the serene seal. One of the people upset was Arlington County Board Member Chris Zimmerman (D).

Zimmerman, now board chairman, described the reaction over the logo as "somewhere between a kerfuffle and a controversy."

"It raised some passions. I was surprised by the number of people who talked to me about it," he said. He heard from seniors and military personnel who were sensitive to the dignity of Arlington National Cemetery. He heard from young residents, who called the logo the "Portico Smoosh" and more fitting for a shopping mall than for a symbol of government.

"The feeling was that critics may come and go, products may come and go, but our civic organization as a people is intended to be enduring through changes in style and fashions, and a seal is intended to symbolize that," he said.

Zimmerman said he experienced the need for a standard most acutely when county officials signed agreements with other local governments. Officials from those jurisdictions signed with their official seals: Fairfax County's coat of arms of the Fairfax family showing a lion and horse on their hind legs, Alexandria's tall ship with a scale of justice or the City of Fairfax's soldiers from the Revolutionary and Civil wars.

So, as part of adopting the standards for the seal, Arlington County officials are drafting a protocol for when the seal should be used -- on all official board documents, for example -- and when the logo can be used.

Zimmerman would like the seal used more often. "I am hopeful of seeing the seal in several locations prominently displayed," he said.

Sun's lonely research on the seal was helped enormously when one day she opened an envelope, and there floated out the original Harvey Wilcox napkin drawing.

"We've now sent it to the Virginia Room of the Arlington library, where it is now officially archived," Curtius said.

In his letter accompanying the napkin, Wilcox wrote: "Many great things have been born as idle doodling, and here's evidence that your Arlington County seal began one lunch hour on Pentagon cafeteria napkins."