Township and other old/odd/embossed local route shields

[afiler]

I had a good run of collecting photos of township route shields growing up in Minnesota, but I haven't seen any in years since moving to Seattle. They were a fairly rare find in Minnesota (most township roads went unsigned, at least until they got blades for E911 rural street addressing), and many of them were colors/formats I hadn't seen before. About half were black-on-white (sometimes the same format as Minnesota's black-on-white county route shields, but often not) and the other half were local designs. A lot of them looked like something out of the 1950s to the 1970s, especially as E911 road signage made them seem much less necessary.

It looks like Ohio has township road shields too and that North Carolina (where townships are more like statistical divisions than local governments) had some at some point in the past. (And Saskatchewan has township road shields of a sort, though those are provincewide and for survey townships, not civil townships.)

First, my two favorites, both embossed like license plates and the old fire number signs that used to be common:

Leon Twp L-75 by afiler, on Flickr


Leon Twp L-9 by afiler, on Flickr

[NE2]

The standard term is 'embossed', which is how all shields used to be.

www.aaroads.com/shields/browse.php

[afiler]

A boring one with just text at the top like the BGS county signs:

Twp Rd 25 by afiler, on Flickr

And one from someone who decided to get a little creative and jam the township name in:

St Joseph Twp 57 by afiler, on Flickr

The standard term is 'embossed', which is how all shields used to be.

Erryes, I knew "stamped" didn't sound right. Corrected.

[SectorZ]

A boring one with just text at the top like the BGS county signs:

Twp Rd 25 by afiler, on Flickr

And one from someone who decided to get a little creative and jam the township name in:

St Joseph Twp 57 by afiler, on Flickr

The standard term is 'embossed', which is how all shields used to be.

Erryes, I knew "stamped" didn't sound right. Corrected.

Did St Lawrence have problems with people building houses in the cover of darkness without permission?

[afiler]

For whatever reason, "X Township Zoned", "X County Zoned", and even "City of X Zoned" type-signs are fairly common in Minnesota. MnDOT doesn't like them, and so they're more likely to appear on county roads (though they sometimes sneak onto state highway assemblies too).

When I'm photographing extremely small places, these building permit warning signs are sometimes the only things I can find with the name of the place (or sometimes it's a fire number sign).

[afiler]

A couple township road shields formatted like Minnesota county road shields, but with some color variety:

Henderson Twp 16 by afiler, on Flickr


Guthrie Twp 198 by afiler, on Flickr

[afiler]

And some more black-on-white ones, first in the standard format:


Belgrade Twp 158 by afiler, on Flickr


Dane Prairie Twp 1142 by afiler, on Flickr


Tyrone Twp T-13 by afiler, on Flickr

And the standard format without border:


Derrynane Twp T-32 by afiler, on Flickr

[Alps]

[Scott5114]

For whatever reason, "X Township Zoned", "X County Zoned", and even "City of X Zoned" type-signs are fairly common in Minnesota. MnDOT doesn't like them, and so they're more likely to appear on county roads (though they sometimes sneak onto state highway assemblies too).

When I'm photographing extremely small places, these building permit warning signs are sometimes the only things I can find with the name of the place (or sometimes it's a fire number sign).

I can't blame Mn/DOT. What purpose do they serve? "Yes, I'm going to build a house right over theeeere–wait, building permits are required beyond this sign? Oh no! I'm ruined!"

[Bitmapped]

Steve - I see you have this photo in your NC miscellaneous collection.  Are you sure it's from there?  I grew up in Wayne County, Ohio, which used signs like this with the Wayne Co. / Number / Township format.  It's gone now, but until ~2000 there was an old rusted one the next street over from the house I lived in.  The text was embossed.  I can't remember if the number was embossed or if it was painted.

Here's Google Street View showing one of these signs along the TR 7 part of Church Road near Orrville, Ohio: http://goo.gl/maps/EuRcF

[Alps]

Steve - I see you have this photo in your NC miscellaneous collection.  Are you sure it's from there?  I grew up in Wayne County, Ohio, which used signs like this with the Wayne Co. / Number / Township format.  It's gone now, but until ~2000 there was an old rusted one the next street over from the house I lived in.  The text was embossed.  I can't remember if the number was embossed or if it was painted.

Here's Google Street View showing one of these signs along the TR 7 part of Church Road near Orrville, Ohio: http://goo.gl/maps/EuRcF

Wow, thank you so much for that context. No, it was a guess. What exactly does it mean to be a county township road?

[afiler]

Now for another type of weird local route shield: county park route.

[NE2]

That's pretty cool. It's a modified forest route shield:

[Bitmapped]

Steve - I see you have this photo in your NC miscellaneous collection.  Are you sure it's from there?  I grew up in Wayne County, Ohio, which used signs like this with the Wayne Co. / Number / Township format.  It's gone now, but until ~2000 there was an old rusted one the next street over from the house I lived in.  The text was embossed.  I can't remember if the number was embossed or if it was painted.

Here's Google Street View showing one of these signs along the TR 7 part of Church Road near Orrville, Ohio: http://goo.gl/maps/EuRcF

Wow, thank you so much for that context. No, it was a guess. What exactly does it mean to be a county township road?

It's just a regular township road.  The Wayne County Engineer's sign shop produced all of the name and number signage for both county and township roads.  At least back in the embossed days, I'm assuming they just put "Wayne Co." at the top rather than having separate setups for each of the 16 townships.

It's pretty unusual to see standalone number signage on township roads in Wayne County nowadays.  Most of these Wayne Co. / Township signs are pretty old.

[hbelkins]

Is this thread supposed to be about embossed route markers, or township/local road route markers, or township/local road route markers that are embossed?

[agentsteel53]

Is this thread supposed to be about embossed route markers, or township/local road route markers, or township/local road route markers that are embossed?

odd jurisdictions.

I've got a STEPHENSON TOWN ROAD 49 shield somewhere.  it's old and embossed and is from Michigan and I need to photograph it.

[hbelkins]

Orange County, NY

[afiler]

I threw in both "old" and "embossed" as separate things because I'm hoping that someone will produce some obviously fresh-looking embossed signs produced by some little road department sign shop somewhere.

If we expand to cover non-blue-pentagon county road signage, I've got a few more:

Day County, South Dakota, apparently didn't want to shell out for an embossing setup, so they just went with stencils:

Day County Road 6 by afiler, on Flickr

An embossed white-on-green sign from Spink County, South Dakota:

Spink County, South Dakota by afiler, on Flickr

[froggie]

afiler:  did you ever get north while you lived in Minnesota?  Cass County has several townships with township route signs, and I believe some of them were embossed.  Alas, I don't have any photos of my own...

[afiler]

The Hendrickson and Guthrie Twp signs (the blue and green) came from Hubbard County, which is just west of Cass County, and the Leon Twp signs came from Clearwater County, which is just west of Hubbard County. I've probably only driven through Cass County a couple times, and only on 71, 200, and 371. I'm sure I'll be through that way again eventually, so I'll have to do a little exploring. I've already poked around for more signs on Google Maps in Clearwater and Hubbard and wasn't able to find any, even the ones I'd photographed before. I suppose they're probably not seen as necessary now that just about every corner has street blades, but I'm still going to hold out hope that there are a few out there.

[froggie]

Take a ride up 84 from Pine River...you should find several assuming they're still around.  My grandparents cabin was about 15 miles north and we went often, though THAT was over 20 years ago and I haven't been up that way since 2011.

[afiler]

I found a few, all black-and-white. Here's one for Ponto Lake Twp. I can't tell if the sign is broken, or if they abbreviated "Ponto Lake Twp" to "Ponto" to fit it on smaller signs.



Here's a Woodrow Twp one, with a curious font.



There are more in the area marked as "X Township Road 0" on Google Maps, but I couldn't find signs for any of those.

And here's what might be a Township Road H (a mile or so south is another road marked with I, and another nearby marked with D, so I'm guessing these are township roads. Google Maps marks some of them with square route markers).

[afiler]

Finally, I've found another non-black-and-white township road sign! I hope it's still there the next time I'm in northern MN. It's got a faded twin across the highway too.



Birch Lake Twp 15 is another boring black-and-white sign, but it's a little interesting since it's one of those rare township roads that actually gets a marker on a state highway:



Here's what might be an old unadorned square township shield next to a new Forest Service shield:



There seem to be a lot of forest service markers in this area, apparently part of Chippewa National Forest (and here's a vertical variant of the FS sign.)

And here's another one of those Indian Route signs (the newer green-background style) found in this part of Minnesota, this one on Leech Lake Indian Reservation:



And finally, one more boring black-and-white one: Turtle Lake Township 5.

[froggie]

"Ponto" has been such for decades.