US Army Service Stripes

When I was a kid in the late 1960s, I inherited a large old pasteboard box with hundreds of souvenir, political, fraternal and advertising pins, medals and brick-a-brac, dating from the late 1880s to the early 1930s. As far as I know, everything had been accumulated by my step father’s father and grandfather. There were also some US Army items mixed in. The items posted here look like they could be a number of things, including much more recent navy insignia, but I am basing my identification on the age of the other items from the box, and the fact that all the military items in it seemed to be from the army. Sooo…

I believe the red stripe is a time in service stripe from an enlisted man’s US Army model 1902 blue uniform jacket. An example of the jacket, borrowed from Google images, is in the third photo. These stripes represented 5 years’ service, and reflected the wearer’s branch color – in this case artillery red.

I'm only guessing, but the gold bullion stripes might also be off of a 1902 uniform, but this time it's officer’s braid.

The 1902 blue jacket was worn by the Army for dress occasions (the duty uniform being khaki) until US involvement in WWI, when everything went to wartime olive drab for a while. It was reintroduced in 1929 until replaced in 1936 by a dress blue jacket with modern lapels.

Over the 1970s and early 1980s, I traded away all the non-military/political stuff in that box, including a Buster Brown pin, St Louis World’s Fair pins, Betty Boop enameled pin, Omaha police officer’s badge, etc. Now I wish I’d held on to everything.

Chris