Remembering Massachusetts, through its signs and markers

I’ve lived more than half of my life away from Massachusetts, where I was born, raised, educated and married. But three types of signs to be found there still make me as nostalgic for my home state as any mental image of Cape Cod, the Boston skyline, the Quabbin Reservoir or the Berkshire Hills.

First are the ubiquitous municipal signs that greet motorists as they enter virtually any city or town in the Bay State. These markers have a curved top resembling an open book, beneath which is the word “ENTERING." The state seal and the date on which the city or town was incorporated appear below that, followed by the name of the community in large capital letters. In our dining room, Liz and I have a small replica of the sign for Oak Bluffs, a town on Martha's Vineyard.

Equally distinctive are the Massachusetts Turnpike signs, with their Pilgrim hat logo. They aren't as memorable as they were back when I was a kid, though. Political correctness had yet to rear its head in that bygone era, and the signs on "the pike" were especially noteworthy in those days because each Pilgrim hat was shot through with an Indian's arrow. An updated version of the hat remains, but the arrow is long gone, which seems only fitting. After all, what we think of as the first Thanksgiving was a harvest festival jointly celebrated by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians.

Which brings us to the third type of sign. These are the 85-year-old historical markers that the state installed in 1930, to commemorate the 300th birthday of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

A few years back, The Boston Globe reported that the Massachusetts Bay Colony Tercentenary Commission put up some 275 of these signs, about 144 of which remain in place. With black lettering on an aluminum background and bearing the state's coat of arms, the markers are “instantly recognizable to most people in Massachusetts,” the article said. They “stand outside town greens, by cemeteries, on the sites of old battles or long-vanished mills.”

There are none of these 300th anniversary markers in my hometown of Southbridge. But several neighboring towns have, or once had, tercentenary markers, including Brimfield (2 of them), Brookfield (1), Oxford (4), Sturbridge (1), Webster (1) and West Brookfield (1), according to a catalogue of the signs that is available online. Now the signs themselves, because they are so old, have become part of the long, remarkably rich history of what is grandly known in Massachusetts as “the Commonwealth.”