Sewah Studios owner Bradford Smith with his company’s own marker. (Photo by Damaine Vonada)
The ubiquitous historical markers seen on roadsides around the country have their own unique look, state by state. Those in Pennsylvania and Virginia have built-in mounting posts. New York’s use extra-large letters for better readability, but Florida’s have a smaller font that allows for more words. Alabama’s and Maryland’s markers flaunt their state flags; West Virginia’s exhibits the state seal; Mississippi’s highlights the state flower. Only one state has its historical markers topped by an outline of the state and the foliage of its state tree.
“Those Buckeye leaves on Ohio’s markers are iconic,” says Bradford Smith, president of Sewah Studios in Marietta, the world’s leading historical marker manufacturer. “No other state has historical markers that are as beautiful and ornate.”
Sewah Studios creates between 1,200 and 1,300 markers annually at its plant in Marietta, and has created markers in all 50 states and around the world. The company currently makes the official markers for more than 30 states and also supplies customers in England, France, Mexico, and Jamaica, and a few other countries as well. Made of cast aluminum, the markers are handcrafted by some 20 employees — who do everything from gluing text onto the templates to pouring molten aluminum into molds to painting letters and logos to shipping them in custom-built crates.
“We’ve always produced our signs by hand,” Smith says. “That’s why they’re works of art.”
It’s certainly fitting that history-laden Marietta, the first permanent settlement in Ohio, dating to 1788, is the company’s home. Local salesman, cartographer, and history buff E.M. Hawes founded it in an old organ factory in 1927 (“Sewah” is “Hawes” spelled backward). Automobile tourism was gaining popularity, and Hawes saw an opportunity to build a roadside marker business. “Hawes was a visionary,” Smith says. “He saw a niche he could fill, and he did it with aluminum alloys.”
In Hawes’s day, commemorative markers and plaques usually were made from wood, which rotted, or iron, which rusted. Hawes not only pioneered the use of more durable cast aluminum, but he also developed a proprietary font and signature layout that continue to impart the “Sewah look” to markers today. “Our lettering style is a modification of the old Caslon font, with serifs that give ‘f’ and ‘g’ a particularly different appearance,” Smith says. “People like its uniqueness.”
After retiring in 1953, Hawes sold Sewah Studios to Smith’s grandfather, Gerald Smith, who constructed its plant in 1959. With separate areas for every aspect of production, the facility is effectively several different businesses — pattern design, typesetting, metal shop, foundry, and painting operation — under one roof. “Each department of Sewah Studios has its own expertise,” Smith says.
The Smith family’s acquisition of Sewah Studios coincided with the dawn of interstate highways, which, in turn, awakened demand for markers as tools for touting history and promoting tourism. Soon after Ohio’s Sesquicentennial Commission began installing blue, Ohio-shaped signs displaying tidbits of information at municipal corporation limits in 1953, it also instigated a historical marker project focusing on significant people, places, and events. Today, Local History Services at the Ohio History Connection (OHC) administers both the Corporate Limits Markers and Ohio Historical Markers programs.
Sewah Studios made the first Ohio Historical Marker in 1957, titled “PORTAGE PATH.” It was erected in Akron at the site of an important carrying place between the Cuyahoga and Tuscarawas rivers; six decades later, that aluminum marker is still standing.
According to Andy Verhoff, a marker funding grant coordinator at Local History Services, OHC records from December 1955 confirm that Sewah Studios also originated the pattern for Ohio’s signs. “The marker committee’s minutes show that Sewah Studios submitted two designs,” says Verhoff, “and the members chose design No. 1, which incorporates the shape of the state supported on each side by clusters of Buckeyes.”
Ohio currently has more than 1,600 historical markers, and Sewah Studios has made every one since 1957. Its relationship with some states, however, is even longer. Sewah Studios, for example, has made Mississippi’s magnolia-adorned markers since 1949. “It has proven to be a wonderful partnership for us,” says Jim Woodrick of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, “because Sewah Studios does a great job with its products and goes out of its way to help.”
In an online age where messaging is instantaneous, the markers are like permanent Post-It notes from the past. They lend the nation’s landscape a sense of place, invite contemplation and conversation, and chronicle often unknown but always authentic stories that both educate and amaze. They also cover every conceivable subject from actors (such as Steubenville’s Dean Martin marker) to zoos (such as the Toledo Zoo’s marker about its New Deal buildings). “At Sewah Studios,” observes Smith, “we’re America’s storytellers.”
