Where can one find out the approx. date of a particular vintage sign? Are there web sites where you can extract the information from?
The reason for asking is that I received some FREE City Classic gasoline and auto repair signs with a kit I bought at a train show yesterday. There’s a larger sign that would look good on the side of one of my buildings but I want to make sure it fits my era (early 40s).
The sign is for Supreme Motor Oil (Gulf Refinery Company) Safe! and there’s a picture of a baseball player sliding past the catcher to tag home plate. I’m not an expert but the baseball uniform looks like 1910-1930 vintage. A few of the other signs on the sheet appear to be newer - e.g. Kelly Tires.
How does one easily determine how old a sign is in order not to create an anachronism? Thanks for the help…
Well to an extent if it looks “vintage” and looks like it would look right in the forties, then it probably is right. You can kinda get a feel for the era after looking at ads for a while. For example before about 1960 ads were usually drawings / paintings rather than photographs, so the medium usually is an indication as to the era.
For these particular ones you could throw them in a scanner and post them so we could take a look.
I wanted to paint and detail a Walthers Al’s gas station in n-scale to be as close to “something” that could exist as possible. Went with Texaco. In progress. So far so good. While doing that research on what gas stations existed in SE PA (Lancaster-Chester counties) in the 40’s to 50’s I found these sites:
It has signs and pictures of practically every brand of gas station in the country. While looking at those photos I was able to get a glimpse of signs, tools, gas pump colors and other details.