Ghost Signs Beckon Long-Gone Customers

Photo by Jaime Ridgley, 2018.

 On her fascinating Bygone Maryland blog, Jaime Ridgley provides a 21st-century public service by photographing Frederick’s ghost signs, the fading advertisements of long-closed businesses. These are easy to overlook – until someone like Ridgley points out how common they are.

So far, she has documented seven, providing not only photographs but capsule histories of the businesses they represented and the citizens who ran them.

From a purely aesthetic viewpoint, my favorite of the signs is the enormous “SENSATION” on the old Kintz Groceries building, but on the level of simple information, I am delighted to learn that 3-C Nectar, a soft drink bottled by Kehne Bros., was billed as “The Drink of the Gods.” What in the world could the three C’s have stood for?

Here are links to Ridgley’s ghost signs of Frederick, in alphabetical order.

In some towns, ghost signs are periodically repainted and maintained, to foster community arts as well as historic preservation, though I don’t know whether this has happened in Frederick.

Ghost signs are at least worth noticing and photographing, wherever they are, if only to remind everyone that all business success is fleeting. One wonders what the ghost signs of 2071 will be.

Sources:

Ridgley, Jaime. Bygone Maryland. https://bygonemaryland.com/. Accessed 19 Nov. 2021.

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