Devil’s Tower

In the 1977 movie, Close Encounters, the main characters are drawn to Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. It’s a bizarre rock formation and has some native American folklore to go with it. It was the first U.S. national monument, established by President Theodore Roosevelt in September 1906. The stamp in the middle of the third row of this page commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of that designation.

Were it not for the movie, though, most Americans would never have seen or heard of it. The point of the stamp and perhaps most commemorative stamps is to bring people, places, events, and idea to the attention of the public. I’m not sure how much this stamp succeeded in 1956 compared to the Steven Spielberg movie twenty-one years later.

Note

The stamp at the end of the fourth row, the one of Nassau Hall in Princeton, is an odd color, a deviation of orange. What’s particularly odd is that they didn’t print it in that color. Instead, they used colored paper and printed it with black ink. They did the same with another stamp five years later, in 1961 (see US-70), commemorating Kansas statehood. For that one, the paper is a dark yellow, providing the color for a sunflower depicted prominently on the stamp. I suspect that in part using colored paper is a technique for introducing multiple colors, which they didn’t seem to do well in the past. But by the 1960s most of the stamps produced were printed in multiple colors. So I’m not sure why they did it with the Kansas stamp – other than for a bolder effect.

Contains 12 spots: own 12 – 12 unused, 0 used.
Page is finished.
Album or Web Page Last changed Mar 23, 2025

Stamp Details

The table below lists information about the stamps shown on this page of Lighthouse’s stamp album. For more details about a particular stamp, click on its description. That will take you to the related web page of Colnect.

spot	own	catalog	subject	description
1.1	✓	1074	Booker T. Washington	3c (apr 1956) comm., dark blue
1.2	✓	1073	Franklin & Electricity Benjamin West	3c (jan 1956) comm., carmine rose
1.3	✓	1076	Fifth Intl. Philatelic Expo	3c (apr 1956) comm., deep violet
2.1	✓	1077	Wild Turkey Meleagris gallopavo	3c (may 1956) comm., rose lake
2.2	✓	1078	Pronghorn Antelope Antilocapra americana	3c (jun 1956) comm., brown
2.3	✓	1079	Chinook Salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha	3c (nov 1956) comm., blue green
3.1	✓	1082	Labor Day	3c (sep 1956) comm., dark blue
3.2	✓	1084	Devils Tower	3c (sep 1956) comm., violet
3.3	✓	1080	Harvey Washington Wiley	3c (jun 1956) comm., dark blue green
4.1	✓	1081	Wheatland James Buchanan	3c (aug 1956) comm., black brown
4.2	✓	1083	Nassau Hall in Princeton	3c (sep 1956) comm., black
5.1	✓	1085	Children of the World	3c (dec 1956) comm., dark blue

Footnotes

Spot refers to the postion of the stamp on the album page (e.g., 3.2 indicates row 3, position 2).
Amt. is an abbreviation for the face amount of the stamp.
Own indicates the stamp status: ✓ for unused; ✗ for used or canceled; ⭑ signifies I ordered one; ; ✨ indicates it was bought recently; ✠ means an auction bid is pending; and ◎ is used, and it costs too much for unused.
To search by catalog number, go to the search box and enter it in the catalog number box. However, it’s a bit broken; I need to fix it.