Blazing A Trail: Dorothy Waugh’s National Parks Posters at Poster House

Poster House, the first museum in the United States dedicated to the global history of posters, will present new exhibitions for the Fall 2025 season. Blazing A Trail: Dorothy Waugh’s National Parks Posters will open to the public on September 27, 2025 and close on February 22, 2026.

Blazing A Trail features 17 travel posters designed between 1934 and 1936 by landscape architect and highly trained artist Dorothy Waugh, created for the National Park Service’s (NPS) first poster campaign.

Starting in the 1870s, America’s railroad companies were the main source of advertising for NPS. They would issue a steady stream of attractive, though conventional, posters advertising the beautiful landscapes and parks on different rail routes. Waugh was the first to advocate for the bureau to produce its own poster campaign, along with styling and messaging, separate from the rail roads.

This poster series was the first time the government had assigned such an ambitious project to a single designer and garnered an outpouring of government posters for the rest of the 20th century.

The exhibition is the first dedicated to the entire campaign and is accompanied by a book.