It’s 144 years old, instantly recognizable and the subject of a bitter custody fight – again.

When Johnson & Johnson sued the American Red Cross last week over the red cross emblem they share, officials of the giant health products company touted the century of collaboration by the two sides. Glossed over was the rocky relationship the parties had in the Gilded Age, when the Red Cross tried to protect itself from merchants trading on its reputation in the wake of the Johnstown Flood of 1889.

With J&J’s filing of the trademark suit in federal court in Manhattan, some of that animosity has come out of hibernation.

“Most of the people I’ve talked to can’t believe they did this,” said Mark Everson, chief executive of the nonprofit relief agency. “It’s one of America’s great companies, with an impeccable reputation, and people are stunned.”

Johnson & Johnson has claimed exclusive commercial rights to the red Greek cross symbol since an 1895 pact signed by Red Cross founder Clara Barton. It has splashed the emblem on Band-Aid boxes, first-aid kits and countless other items. The relief organization, meanwhile, has used the insignia primarily for fund-raising and humanitarian work.

Those distinctions began to blur in 2004, J&J says, when the Red Cross licensed the emblem for a rival line of first-aid kits. In the past year, the licensing has extended to baby mitts, toothbrushes and humidifiers, and J&J was forced to take legal steps to defend its rights, according to John Crisan, general counsel for the company’s consumer division.

Everson said that’s nonsense. First-aid kits have been sold by the Red Cross organization since 1903, and the nonprofit tried unsuccessfully to work out a marketing deal with Johnson & Johnson in recent years. The American Red Cross only pulls in some $2 million a year from licensing, he said, mostly on disaster preparedness products the agency has touted since Sept. 11. That hardly puts a dent in sales by J&J, whose consumer products division reaped $1.7 billion in operating profit last year.

“Americans need to be prepared,” Everson said. “We have absolutely increased our activities in what we are doing in the commercial marketplace.”

The red cross emblem dates to 1863, with the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, Switzerland. The image mimics the Swiss flag, with the colors inverted.

When Barton founded the American Red Cross in 1881, she began using the symbol, too.

Johnson & Johnson adopted an identical logo when it was incorporated as a medical supply company in 1887. (Sales that year were $120,000. They are now $53 billion.)

Business records are sketchy from the period, and it’s not clear if J&J was riding on the relief agency’s coattails. But many companies clearly were: Customers in the late 19th century could buy Red Cross whiskey, Red Cross cigars and Red Cross soap, among other products.

It was too much for Barton, known as the “Angel of the Battlefield” for her front-line nursing during the Civil War. The Red Cross leader tried unsuccessfully to patent the emblem, as much to deter fraudulent fund-raisers as manufacturers with questionable tie-ins, according to a biography, “Clara Barton: Professional Angel,” by Elizabeth Brown Pryor.

In the early 1890s, Barton tried another tack: federal legislation that would protect the insignia. The effort seemed to be making headway until the bill was reintroduced in Congress in 1894, and J&J took forceful steps to stop it.

“That company had been using the trademark for eight years, and so successful had its products been that it hired a noted jurist to lecture the Senate on their constitutional powers – which, the jurist maintained, did not include restricting the use of insignia that had not been granted a trademark by the Patent Office,” Pryor wrote.

The bill went nowhere, and in 1895 Johnson & Johnson struck an agreement with Barton, essentially agreeing not to block future legislation if it retained an exclusive right to use of the emblem for the sale of “chemical, surgical and pharmaceutical preparations of every description.” In exchange for that right, J&J agreed to pay the American Red Cross $1 a year.

The agreement would cause Barton some discomfort. In 1897, Johnson & Johnson scientific director Fred Kilmer – father of the poet Joyce Kilmer – told her about the company’s carefully lawyered plans to publish a journal for doctors under the name “Red Cross Notes,” according to a 1999 biography of J&J founder Robert Wood Johnson by Laurence Foster.

“We are stupid about law,” Barton complained in her diary.

The American Red Cross now says the Barton agreement is null and void, because no law was passed that ultimately granted it sole right to the logo – a precondition for assigning commercial use to J&J.

The federal charter of the agency in 1900 provided the red cross emblem some protection from misuse, which was strengthened in legislation signed by Theodore Roosevelt five years later. But both laws provided a loophole for companies already using the insignia, such as Johnson & Johnson. And in 1906, J&J registered the symbol as a commercial trademark.

The idea J&J is basing its claim on a carved-out exception annoys Everson.

“They’re acting as if they have a superior right and we have a limited right,” he said. “Congress gave us the superior right.”

Still, for most of the past century, J&J and the Red Cross coexisted peacefully. Problems, when they arose, typically came from the outside. Recently, for example, producers of the horror film “Saw III” were told to remove the familiar red cross from ghoulish nurses’ hats on a movie poster.

“It’s been a very long, complex history,” Crisan, the J&J attorney, said, “one that’s been a good history.”

Johnson & Johnson would like nothing better than to restore the status quo, but the lawsuit could have unintended consequences. Everson said the Red Cross would “vigorously defend” itself, and would take a hard look at J&J’s own use of the logo.

“Suing the American Red Cross is sort of like suing Santa Claus,” said Roberta Jacobs-Meadway, a leading trademark attorney in Philadelphia. “It certainly seems to me to be unwise in a number of respects.”

A key defense in trademark disputes is who holds the greater claim to a symbol. Asked what the red cross emblem represents, the average American probably would not name Johnson & Johnson, Jacobs-Meadway said.

“I would expect that most of the goodwill associated with that mark belongs with the Red Cross organization,” she said.