On 20 January 2014, I had business in the picturesque town of Washington, on the banks of the Missouri, turgid as it was. It was a beautiful morning and, with business completed, I decided to take a walking tour of the town with an eye cast out for wallsigns of interest. This is what I found.

Through the last 12 years as a self taught photographer, I have shot many subjects ranging from all-girl roller derby action to “warts and all” portraiture to life on the Meramec River near my home in Fenton, Missouri.

Let me introduce a colleague and friend from “across the pond.” Sam Roberts has not only done groundbreaking work in the documentation of wall signs throughout the UK, he has induced an intrepid band of wall sign enthusiasts, cameras at the ready, to help him in his quest to create a comprehensive survey of these fading and charming ads, “hidden in plain sight,” as Sam likes to say. Take a look at ghostsigns.co.uk.com and you will agree that his efforts are nothing less than breathtaking in scope.

Here are some new wall sign discoveries in my travels in Missouri and Illinois during this Year of Our Lord 2013. Some are old ghosts and some newly exposed.

The brick wall was – and still is – the ideal location for a business owner to tell the world his name and trade. Throughout the City of St. Louis, one may still see evidence of this most basic and succinct form of advertising.

Hats and shoes have always been staples of the St. Louis economy. Indeed, the old expression about the St. Louis Browns was, “First in shoes, first in booze, and last in the American League.”

Stripping paint from this building at 111 W. Argonne Drive, near the Kirkwood train station, revealed vintage commercial signs: Coulter Feed Co. with the Purina Checkerboard pattern and a Bull Durham Tobacco sign on the side. The building dates to 1912 and was built as a feed and grain operation with a drive-through doorway in the center for wagons.

There was a time when Tobacco Road ran through St. Louis. Toward the end of the 19th century, St. Louis was the largest processor of pipe and chewing tobacco in the United States. According to an industry periodical, Connorton’s Tobacco Brand Directory of the United States, St. Louis was number one in tobacco-producing cities for the year 1887 with an output of 40,284,675 pounds.

Lonnie Tettaton is the maestro of wall signs in St. Louis, whether that sign is done from scratch, using either client’s or his own design, or it is one to be carefully “touched up”such as the historic Bull Durham Tobacco sign in downtown Collinsville, Illinois.

“They were extremely fast with these big walls, but then many did nothing but walls. They had tricks the younger people hadn’t picked up.”—Gus Holthaus, signpainter, Cincinnati

Suddenly exposed through the demolition of an adjoining building, this old sign appeared on the side of the old Grand-Olive Market. Here is a classic example of a commercial double-exposure or palimpsest, Fletcher’s Castoria painted over an earlier ad for Quaker Oats.

SOME PEOPLE REFER TO ALMOST ANY AGING WALL SIGN AS A “GHOST.” IN MY WORLD THERE ARE WALL SIGNS AND THEN THERE ARE GHOST SIGNS.

A long-discontinued local brand, Blanke’s is one of my favorite signs, partly because of the literary reference to Goethe’s famous work, Faust, a tragic play in two parts. The storyline has Mephistopheles, a devil, tempting Dr. Faust with 24 additional years of life in which he is to have “every pleasure and all knowledge at his command.” In this depiction, that same Mephistopheles tempts the consumer with a savory brand of coffee.

Tobacco Road once came through St. Louis and its vicinity. These five sign walls, featuring four smoking brands, were signposts along the way. See also Weisert Tobacco Co. for more local tobacco lore.

There are prominent Sunny Brook Whiskey signs on either side of the river at St. Louis, both of them quite dated and both painted on the sides of large red, brick buildings. The Old Sunny Brook Distillery Company, based in Louisville, Kentucky, produced Kentucky Straight Bourbon and Kentucky Blended Whiskey.

As a political protest, it has gotten more attention than a park full of Occupy protesters. It amuses. It polarizes. It sparks debate. It is an embarrassment to some and an indictment to others. It has made the front page of both the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The St. Louis Daily Record.

Grand Avenue is one of the longest streets in St. Louis, a north-south thoroughfare with a median near Saint Louis University where the numbers start in the single digits and begin to climb in either direction. North Grand Circle, close to its terminus at Interstate 70, is a roundabout with a large, white Corinthian column in the middle. A landmark in what is now called College Hill.

On a sweltering day in August, 2010, at a little past one, Martin Luther King Drive in St. Louis, had something special to offer. A funeral procession with horse-drawn hearse and a small cortege of mourners came rolling up the street. Now Martin Luther King Drive in its 4200-block is a busy place with lots of shops and businesses, yet all activity ceased for a few minutes.

St. Louis is and has been a beer-soaked town. In the city, on nearly every other block, the corner tavern may be found. It’s nothing new; beer has been flowing from local taps for 200 nears now. The  difference between beer served a century ago and what is served today is that today’s brew is colder, subject to having gone through more processes, and, in many cases, lighter on the alcohol content. Yes, beer came in bottles Way Back When; even today,  it is not uncommon to find discarded, mostly intact 19th century beer bottles, some beautifully embossed, in creek beds, home cellars, and at the bottom of old privies that once dotted every back yard.

The Hyde Park Brewery in St. Louis operated from 1878 to 1948, with a twelve-year hiatus during the prohibition era. It was, in fact, one of the few local breweries to reopen upon repeal of the Volstead Act. The beer’s slogan was the modest proclamation “Seldom Equaled, Never Excelled.”