Vintage 1970s Lee County Georgia Sheriff Tin Litho Special Police Toy Badge Pin 🚔 New Old Stock on Card

Who Was Sheriff of Lee County, Georgia? ⭐ A Round Star for Lee County, Georgia

Size: 4" x 2 1/4" ~ New Old Stock, still on its card.

This is a 1970s tin litho pinback, black ground, about an inch and a half across, with a big yellow five-point star printed across the face. A red ring reads SHERIFF'S DEPT. across the top and COUNTY along the bottom. Down across the star's lower point, in red script, it reads Lee, with GEORGIA set in solid caps just above. It's a toy badge, sized for a kid's shirt pocket, not a working part of anybody's uniform. They seldom turn up for sale, carded or loose.

The card underneath is doing its own job. A red banner across the top reads SPECIAL POLICE BADGE, and beside it a cartoon motorcycle cop in a white cap and big goggles leans over his handlebars with a city skyline behind him. JAPAN is printed small in the corner. Japan was the dime store's toy factory for a generation after the war, turning out tin toys and badges by the millions for American racks, until a stronger yen in the 1970s sent much of that work on to Hong Kong and Taiwan. The story collectors and sellers love to tell is that this whole business of Japanese tin badges goes back to General Douglas MacArthur and his push to get Japan's factories humming again after the war. There's real history under that one: Japan's toymakers got permission to start making and exporting toys again, and the occupation government MacArthur headed even helped line up subsidized American steel for tinplate toys. The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York keeps a little Japanese tin sheriff's badge from about 1950 as an example of those early export toys. Badge and card come sealed together in a poly sleeve, the way they hung on the rack.

🏛️ The Little Seal at the Center

Look close at the middle of the star and there's a tiny round medallion: an arch on columns with a figure standing inside it. It's a miniature of the Georgia state seal, an arch held up by three pillars for Wisdom, Justice and Moderation, with a soldier standing guard underneath. Whoever drew this button's art was quoting the state's own seal, shrunk down to fit inside the star.

📜 Lee County's Own Story

Lee County is real, and it's old. Georgia's legislature created it by acts of June 9, 1825 and December 11, 1826, and named it for a Lee, though which one is a fair question. Some say Richard Henry Lee, the Virginia congressman who in 1776 moved that the colonies "declare themselves free and independent." Others say it was Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee III, the Revolutionary cavalry commander and the father of Robert E. Lee. The county's own historical marker tells it both ways, so I will too. The first officers were commissioned May 14, 1827, Nathan Powell among them as sheriff, the very office named on this button. The county was bigger in its early days too: its original ground later became Randolph, Stewart, Quitman, Sumter, Terrell and Webster counties, plus pieces of Marion and Clay. The county seat today is Leesburg, just up the road from Albany, and the sheriff is still elected by the county's voters every four years, as Georgia sheriffs have been since the state's early days.

🗓️ When These Were Made

Nothing on the card gives a year, but the rest of the family does. The same card design carries a New York button copying the NYPD patch adopted July 1, 1971, and a San Francisco button copying the SFPD patch added around 1970. That puts this whole line of cards on the dime-store racks in the 1970s, Lee County right along with them, and two more things agree: a Tennessee sheriff's button on the same card is printed 1776-1976 for the Bicentennial, and loose buttons from the series have a cream plastic back moulded MADE IN JAPAN and PAT. NO. 1196679, a Japanese utility-model registration filed in November 1972 and granted in 1977.

🚔 Badges Kids Really Got

Dime-store tin badges weren't just toys sitting on a rack. Real sheriff's departments ran junior deputy and youth programs, swearing kids in at fairs and school visits and handing out belts and badges of their own. Sheriffs gave tin badges just like this one out as prizes in their youth programs, too. A kid who got handed a little star like this one walked away standing a bit taller, and that's the other half of what a card like this carries.