Mapping Center Answer:

Yes, there is a way to do this. It will work when you show categories of data and it requires that you have a symbol set (style) that contains the symbols you want to use, and the feature class with an attribute that identifies the type of feature, and -- most importantly -- the  names of the symbols must be exactly the same as the attribute values. Exactly -- including capital letters and spaces.

Here is the link to the help topic on this subject: Drawing a layer using categories -- scroll down to Using Match to symbols in a style to display categories.