Goodbye, ghost sign (a story of good/bad timing)
April 26th, 2011 by Rural_RoseLast Sunday on the chilly but bright morning, C-Nor (a.k.a. Chris) and I set out for a photo trip, and our journey led us to the town of Roseville, Ill.
Roseville is a town I traveled through countless times as a college student, but haven’t been through in years, ever since the section of four-lane highway between Macomb and Monmouth, IL, was finished. Roseville, to me, is poetic for that very reason–a self-sufficient town that is now cut off by the long fought-for interstate.
Anyway, as we rolled down Main Street and I tried to remember how many years it’s been since the four-lane was finished, I was surprised to see what appeared to be a magnificent ghost sign appearing in front of me. On the side of what appeared to be an abandoned building on Main Street, just before the four-way stop (at Main Street and Highway 116), the ghost of a Firestone ad/business sign could be detected.
(more, below the photo)
Despite my having traveled this very path many times over many years, I never noticed this little piece of the past, probably because
A) another business next door, which has since been torn down to create a gaping spot on Main Street, had been covering it up, and/or
B) I’ve only recently caught the ghost sign bug, and so never stopped to pay attention.
But either way, I certainly noticed it, and when we got out of the car to take a few pictures, I noticed upon a bit of squinting that, just behind the word “TIRES” in the center, it looked like the ghost of a “Ford” symbol was peaking out, too. (We would discover at little later that we were right. More on that in a minute.) A few guys on tractors with loader buckets were working around us, but didn’t seem to mind us poking around.
But then, when we walked further down the south side of the building, discovering the blue bulldozer parked outside, a guy on a tractor rolled over to us. When he approached me, he pulled his sunglasses to the end of his nose, revealing a set of dark eyes and a suspicious but not entirely unfriendly look. “Where you folks from?” he said.
“Hi, we’re just, uh, amateur photographers, we like old signs,” I said, in one nervous rush. “This okay, okay if we take a picture?”
He was already putting the tractor in reverse, and as he backed up, he called out, “Okay, but we’re about ready to tear it down, so…” And then he went back to work picking up bricks with the loader.
“Wow,” I said to Chris. “Timing, huh?”
(More, below the slideshow)
After this, we sat in the park in some of the purest, brightest sunshine I’ve felt in a long time, sharing our picnic lunch and talking about wedding/moving plans and other stuff of life. We stopped at the little antique store on the corner at the 4-way stop, “Cluckers Corners,” where two white-haired ladies greeted us at the door but seemed less than excited at having customers. We took some more shots around town. One place that caught my eye was a tiny brick building with a ghost sign for a former newspaper and/or printing press on the side. As I was trying to get a picture of it, a guy with shaggy gray hair and a baseball cap emerged.
“I like the sign on the side of your building,” I said, (kind of like “We come in peace.”) “Okay if we’re taking pictures?”
“Sure,” he said.
And then, small-town girl that I am, having grown up in a Roseville look-alike (Carthage, IL), I started chatting with the guy, telling him how we’d just been down by the old Firestone building and how I thought it was a shame it was being torn down.
“Yeah,” he said, “my great-grandfather had that place built. He was a farmer, came in to town and had the business…”
The guy walked to a work van parked in front of the newspaper building and set something inside. Then he dug a tin of tobacco out of his pocket and took a pinch. He said that his building, and the old Firestone, were expensive to keep up. “The city had been on him,” he said, referring to the owner of Firestone.
We could hear the clangs and backing-up-signal beepin of the cleanup crew tearing the place down, less than a block away. “I don’t get too upset about stuff like that,” he said, and I didn’t know if he meant about city ordinances, or about pieces of his family or town history going by the wayside, so I didn’t know what to say. He gestured toward the newspaper building. “I just use this to store stuff,” he said. “Junk, mostly.”
And we thanked him and walked away.
When we got back to our car, the workers at the old Firestone had broken into that south wall with the ghost sign. It would probably be gone by the end of the day.
On a somewhat related note: the Galesburg Register-Mail reported that same day on razing part of Abingdon’s downtown. But hey, if I’m totally depressing you, here is some good news on the local history/landmark beat).
Nick 
Alison 
Beth 
Paula 
Jerry 
Richard 
Tom Snee 
I have wondered the same thing many times.
Thanks, Fred; I’m glad to know some one else has been curious about the place! I think we both need to ask our parents! (?)
I remember when it was open, 1960′s, also there was another cafe in the bottoms, halfway between Carthage and Colchester. I think there was a reference to the first one in Hallwas’s Bootlegger. Apparently there was a time when you didn’t dare stray too far on the prairie without possibility of food and gas, pun intended.