To the Hon. I. B. Brown Prest of the Legestatine Cormeil Lei the request Legislative accordance, therefore with Letter of Wm. B. Conway, Secretary of the Territory of Iowa, describing the seal of the Territory. The Great Seal of a sovereign state, like the signature of a private person, is a symbol of authenticity. This symbol of our commonwealth, embracing that of the Territory of Iowa, has been associated with some very interesting circumstances. Most of the information possessed by the general public in regard to our Great Seals is based on accounts by the late Hon. Theodore S. Parvin. Mr. Parvin was a witness to and a participant in many vital affairs in the foundation of the Territory and of the State. His contributions to the published sources of information are quite voluminous, and in the main are accurate. As to the Great Seals and their origin, Mr. Parvin seems to have written without some of the original source materials at hand at the time he presented his recollections, and not until comparatively recent days has any one else had aids of a different character from those used by him. But after the establishment of the Hall of Public Archives, and the gathering together of the various documentary materials that lay for half a century inaccessible in various vaults in the Capitol, new light has been thrown upon this and various other transactions of the officials of the Territory and the State. For the purpose of adding to the information Mr. Parvin and others made available, and not in any sense for the purpose of controverting recollections of Mr. Parvin, I present by original evidences the subject of the selection, the use, the manufacture and the evolution of the seals of our Commonwealth. The writings of Mr. Parvin, to which I allude, are in the main as follows: Territorial Seal of Iowa. A. B. F. Hildreth, Esq., Editor of the St. Charles Intelligencer: Dear Sir:-I have, this winter, received from three different parts of the State requests to furnish an account of the "Great Seal of the State of Iowa." You, with many others, have doubtless observed, that while all commissions and documents issued from the Executive Department of the State Government bear an impression called "The Great Seal of the State of Iowa," upon the maps of the country, all collections of State Seals, and even the recent large and valuable Report of the State Geologist, has as its "coat of arms" the "Great Seal of the Territory of Iowa." Whether this be the result, in the first two instances cited, of ignorance or not, I am unable to say. In the last case cited, I know that Prof. Hall selected the "Territorial" seal from his own good taste, with the "advice and consent" of Gov. Lowe, who, with every other gentleman of refinement, cannot but regret the bad taste that conceived and adopted the conglomerate devices of our present "Great Seal." The description of these seals is not so much sought after as their history. "The Great Seal of the Territory of Iowa" originated with the Hon. Wm. B. Conway, first Secretary of the Territory of Iowa, and was engraved by Mr. Wm. Wagner, of York, Pennsylvania. At the request of the Legislative Council, Mr. Conway addressed to that branch of the Legislative Assembly a communication, of which the following is a copy, extracted from page 45 of the Journal of the Council:1 This communication was referred to a committee who reported the following resolution, which was adopted, viz: “Resolved, That the seal submitted to the Council by the Secretary of the Territory, be adopted by the Council as the 'Great Seal of the Territory of Iowa.'" 'See letter as shown on pp. 567-8. Original on file in Hall of Public Archives. The seal is one inch and five-eighths in diameter, and the word "Great" is not upon the seal, notwithstanding the Hon. Secretary in his communication and the Council in their resolution have it prefixed. The devices upon the seals for the Supreme Court, District Courts, Commissioners' Court and Probate Courts were all designed by the Hon. Secretary, and were all as appropriate in their several spheres as that of the "Great" seal of the Territory. This latter seal was never adopted by the Legislative Assembly, but by the Legislative Council, the higher branch thereof, which held its sessions in the lower story or basement of the old Zion Church in Burlington. There are some facts connected with the early history of this seal which I must omit, as well as the history of the seal of the State, which latter I will continue in another paper. Muscatine, Feb. 24th, 1859.2 Theodore S. Parvin. Seal of the State of Iowa. Editor Intelligencer: I am unable to furnish much concerning the history of our great seal, but hope that this paper may lead the Hon. W. E. Leffingwell or some other competent person, to supply my omissions. I find from an examination of the Journal of the House of Representatives, that on the 9th of December, 1846, Mr. Leffingwell, in pursuance of previous notice, asked and obtained leave, and introduced H. R. file No. 2, joint resolution, authorizing the Secretary of State to procure a State seal. This joint resolution underwent various amendments in each branch of the General Assembly until the 25th of February, 1847, it was passed in the shape of a law. The journals are so meager that I can learn nothing of its original draught. The law reads as follows, viz:* Now, all this is encompassed within the radius of one inch, and if Solomon were to revisit this earth and see this great seal, he would recall his declaration that there is nothing new under the sun. I may justly apply to this great seal the remark made by an ex-Mayor of a certain sign on Second st.: "That no man would violate the second commandment were he to bow down to it or serve it, for it is not in the likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the water under the earth." The old territorial seal, so neat and chaste in its design, was lost in the removal to Des Moines (pity it had not been the other), ANNALS OF IOWA, 1st ser. v. I, pp. 264-66, April, 1864. 3Laws of Iowa, First G. A., Ch. CXII, p. 164. See act as set out at page 576 hereof. and to preserve some of the old county seals from a similar fate, I would suggest to our County Judges the propriety of depositing them in the collections of the State Historical Society at Iowa City. T. S. Parvin." Muscatine, Feb. 28, 1859. At the time of the publication of these articles Mr. Parvin was the editor of the ANNALS OF IOWA. In the Editorial Department he published a note with illustrations of the two seals, which is herewith reproduced:" Territorial and State Seals of Iowa.-By the help of our tasteful and enterprising publishers, we are enabled to present our readers with proof impressions of these Seals, to accompany our article on pages 264, 266, and we appeal to the good taste of the reader to sustain the correctness of our criticisms thereon. In the next number of the ANNALS Mr. Parvin gives place to a good-natured debate upon the merits of these two seals, as follows: Great Seal of Iowa-again. [We gladly give a place to the following characteristic letter from our old friend of many years. "Old Enoch" has no "axe to grind" and he ably argues "the other side." The Lieut. Gov. is the author of Iowa's motto upon the monument to the "Father of his ANNALS OF IOWA, 1st ser. v. I, pp. 266-67, April, 1864. |