Taylor made: the ‘Sign Man’ retires
Robert Taylor, a recently retired maintenance man for Washington County parks, makes a wooden sign using a router at the Mingo Creek County Park maintenance building recently.
Robert Taylor, a recently retired county maintenance worker, makes all the wooden signs for the county parks in the Mingo Creek County Park maintenance building.
Before vehicles were equipped with GPS, if you could find your way around a Washington County park – or find the destination at all – it was probably due to Robert Taylor.
The rich brown wooden signs with recessed letters were guided by Taylor’s steady hands using what his boss described as a router “from the mid-1930s, I would say, and that’s not a joke. But Bob considers it his little baby.”
White paint inside these recesses helps each letter and number stand out.
Jeff Donahue, Washington County superintendent of recreation, emphasized that the letters and numbers “were not cut by a laser.”
Taylor, 64, of Charleroi, who has crafted the signs for the past 29 years, is retiring from the Washington County Parks Department. Although Taylor was the keeper of Ten Mile Creek County Park in East Bethlehem Township, he crafted signs that are used there, plus in the thousands of acres that make up Mingo Creek and Cross Creek county parks and the 17-mile part of the Panhandle Trail in Washington County, which stretches from McDonald to the West Virginia boundary.
Kevin Garrison, Washington County superintendent of parks who was Taylor’s supervisor, said when the Thompson Hill development of Cross Creek Lake with a boat launch and playground near West Middletown was wrapping up last year, the project required a slew of signage.
“Knowing that Bob was going to have to make these signs, I wasn’t sure how to tell him or what Bob was going to say, or if he would retire early,” Garrison told the county commissioners earlier this month.
“But when I sat and discussed this with Bob, I got the best response a boss can get: ‘No problem, how many, what are the dimensions,’ and so on. In my position, it’s good to see my staff take initiative, work hard and take pride in what they do, knowing it will benefit park users. That’s what Bob did and has always done.”
Taylor worked at the Washington County Health Center for more than a year before beginning his tenure in the parks department, and he said he had no real background in woodworking before his “assignment.”
The signs’ backgrounds are not painted. “To be honest with you, we bought so much of it they started calling it Mingo brown,” Taylor said of the stain that is used.
Some signs are adorned with a pine tree logo. “Those are all made out of redwood,” Taylor said. “It’s one of the best woods I ever routed. They just last forever.”
The Washington County Planning Commission oversees the bridge department, and, in Washington County, the stars among spans are the covered bridges. Taylor has carved with his router name plates of the covered bridges throughout the county. “That’s oak,” he said of the bridge identifiers.
No one driving past the signs at 55 mph is going to notice if words are not centered, but Taylor has always been a stickler for precision.
Taylor and his brothers, Gerald “J.T.” and Doug Taylor have dressed in pre-1840-style costumes during flintlock deer-hunting season and staged their own re-enactments of encampments to demonstrate to Mingo guests during Pioneer Days the long-gone culture of mountain men who populated the area before forests were clear-cut for agriculture. Many of the trappers and traders were French, so their gatherings were known as the rendezvous.
His designated replacement at the router is Jim Knizner.
“Let’s say it was thrust upon him begrudgingly,” Taylor said before signing off for the last time.