Road Signs and Billboards.
Before the automobile a traveler by rail or coach looked out the window and saw only the prevailing scenery as it passed by. Railroad stations usually bore a sign which announced the name of the place, but arrival by coach did not customarily offer such a courtesy. Signs which displayed the name of the town were not needed when visitors were relatively few and the natives already knew where they lived. When crossroads were encountered by travelers they were sometimes identified by a marker of some sort but just as often they were not. Many roads bore multiple names, depending upon where they were encountered.
Road signs offering directions and distance were the result of the automobile, as were the roads themselves and the manner of identifying them by number. So was sign advertising, in the form of billboards. It didn’t take long for advertising companies to recognize the increasing number of people traveling by automobile. Towns interested in increasing the traffic through them also saw an opportunity to interest travelers in the charms of their community. Some of the earliest billboards were achieved by advertisers receiving permission to paint barns located along the sightlines of roads. Many of these are still visible along rural roads, sometimes announcing businesses which no longer exist.
The posting of billboards and roadside signs exploded in the 1920s, when it was largely unregulated except by occasional local ordinances. In 1925 Burma Shave began its longtime advertising campaign by spelling out amusing axioms presented on a series of successive signs. By 1963, the final year of the campaign, more than 600 sets of the signs had been installed along American roads. Billboards announcing upcoming attractions, businesses, products, services, events, jobs, and virtually everything else which someone wanted to bring to public attention covered America’s highways.
It reached the point that by the 1960s the state and federal governments began to take action to limit the number of billboards and their content, both to prevent excessive distraction of the driver and to ensure compliance with other standards. When cigarette advertising was banned from television it moved extensively to billboards, and new standards were written and applied to the roadside signs. There are still stretches of interstate highway in many states in which both sides of the interstate are a continuing stream of billboards.
Several tourist destinations, such as South Dakota’s Wall Drug and South Carolina’s South of the Border, built billboard chains which extend for hundreds of miles on the main roads which approach them. Neither the tourist attraction itself nor the billboard campaign touting it existed before the automobile, and neither could exist without it. In some areas of the nation a twenty mile drive exposes the traveler to more advertising than three hours of television, even if eyes remain on the road and the signs are seen but peripherally.