Vintage Worms For Sale Hand Lettered Wood Trade Sign, c. 1930–1960

The Piece

A hand lettered wood sign, built from weathered softwood boards cut to a point at both ends so the edges of the panel run as a row of pickets.

Across the face, in a shaded serif drawn freehand by a practised hand, is WORMS FOR SALE with PICK YOUR OWN on the line below it. The letters carry a drop shadow, which is sign painter's work and not amateur work. The ground is a pale buttermilk cream, and a later hand has added small sprigs of green leaf into the upper corners.

What the sign looks like now is the record of how it was used. The paint has gone brittle and lifted away in hard edged islands, taking the lettering with it wherever it went, so the words survive in fragments across a field of bare silvered wood. Beneath the losses the softwood has eroded until the hard latewood stands proud in fine parallel ridges you can feel with a thumb. One board carries a sound knot that the letterer simply drew around.

Two small screw eyes are set into the lower edge, each holding a loop of twisted dark wire, and from those hang two later additions: a small galvanized watering can with a soldered seam, a brace handle and a rose ended spout, and a shallow red painted tin bowl decorated with a garland of green leaves and pink and cream blossom, slung on a wire hanger coiled into open spirals.

History & Provenance

This is an original roadside trade sign that spent a very long time outdoors, and the paint is what proves it.

Look at how the ground has failed. It has not faded, chalked or worn thin. It has gone hard and brittle, cracked into a net, and shed in stiff flakes with clean edges, leaving bare wood between the islands that remain. That is the failure mode of a linseed oil house paint, and it is not the failure mode of a latex or acrylic. Latex chalks and washes away; it does not stand up in shards. Oil based exterior paint was the ordinary product for a farm sign through the first half of the last century and was displaced by latex from the 1950s onward.

The lettering is inside that film, not on top of it. Where the ground has flaked, the black has gone with it, so the words are broken in exactly the places the paint is missing. That means the sign was lettered when it was painted and not applied later to a distressed board, which is what a decorative reproduction does.

Then there is a second clock. Under the losses the wood has eroded so that the soft springwood is gone and the hard latewood stands in ridges. That erosion could only begin after the paint had already failed and left the wood bare. So the sign ran a full paint life outdoors, then ran a second long stretch with no protection at all. The picket cut ends are weathered around their cut faces to match the rest, so the shaping is not recent either.

The lettering itself supports the same reading. A shaded serif, evenly spaced, with a consistent stroke weight and a proper drop shadow, is the work of somebody who lettered signs. That was an ordinary trade skill through mid century and an increasingly scarce one afterwards. Country and primitive decorating of the 1980s and 1990s imitates this hand but does it loosely and does not shade.

The green leaf sprigs in the corners are the one later element on the board. They sit crisp and unbroken across a surface that is flaking around them, which means they went on after the ground had already failed. They are a refresh by a later owner who wanted to keep the sign looking cared for, and they are honest to say so.

The two hanging ornaments are also later. Both are light craft pieces, the watering can a thin gauge galvanized miniature with a soldered seam and a wire brace, the red bowl a tin form painted with a tole style floral garland, hung on hand coiled wire. Neither is a period utility object and neither is presented as one. They are a previous owner's addition and they are included as found.

A correction is owed. This was first catalogued at c. 1975 to 2000 as a decorative country sign made from reclaimed lumber. That reading took the corner sprigs and the hanging ornaments as evidence for the whole object and did not look closely enough at how the ground paint had failed. Once the paint film is read properly, the sign itself is generations older than its trimmings.

No signature, stencil, stamp or date is present anywhere on the board. That absence gives an outer limit and not a starting point.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

The line is the whole thing. WORMS FOR SALE, PICK YOUR OWN gets a reaction from everyone who reads it, and an object that makes a person smile in a shop is an object that leaves the shop.

What makes it worth more than the joke is that it is real. This sign hung on a road somewhere and sold bait to people who pulled over, and every mark on it is a record of that. The broken lettering, the ridged grain, the islands of cream paint holding on are not a finish anybody applied. They are time, and no reproduction has ever managed to fake the way an oil paint film breaks up over forty years.

It hangs anywhere a wall needs breaking up without needing a frame or a nail pattern: a mudroom, a potting shed, a garden room, a porch, the back of a kitchen door, a bar, a cabin. The picket cut edges and the silvered wood do the work a frame would otherwise have to.

For a dealer, original American roadside signage is one of the few categories that still sells to collectors, to decorators and to people who just like it, which is three markets for one object. Surviving examples with the lettering still legible and the board still sound are getting harder to find every year, because most of them were left up until there was nothing left to take down.