Frostburg mining journal. [volume] (Frostburg, Md.) 1871-1913, 1899-03-11

and Trees Detrnct From the Value
Of Adjacent Property-An Expert
ment In New York.
1t is a healthy sign when a protest
against long existing evils becomes gen
eral. For score or more of years-ever
since the time, in fact, when some ma
lignant genius conceived the idea of
turning the fair earth to account to help
him sell pills and shoes and gum-the
landscape, not alone in this country,
but in Europe, especially i'll England,
has been outrageOuslv abused by men
supplied with garish paint and paid by
manufacturers and sChemers. Without
so much as saying, by your leave"
they have applied their paint and their
muscle and what may possibly be re-
garded by themselves as taste, but is by
other persons known to be a misfortune,
to bedaubing rocks, trees, barns sheds,
even houses, with their advertisements.
Farmers have sometimes lent their
premises for gain and suffered their
henhOuses and piggeries to be decorated
with large capital letters. The adver-
tASlbS CNIi "OuINl hOl 10 SO bfiu IL IL
were restricted to farm buildings, says
the Brooklyn Eagle. There may be a
farmer now and then who believes that
his premises are improved by the outlay
of paint, especially such bright red and
yellow and green paint as the travellers
put there, but there is no excuse for
painting rocks and trees. 1t is an af
front RI &c Sla n n fhn fanp
of every citizen who appreciates fitness
and beauty. 1t is a grotesque misappli-
cation, for in nature all is healthful,
yet these tiends placard cliffs and woods
with suggestions of disease.
There are people who are so disguised
by the displays made by some of the
more hardy and coarse minded of the
advertisers that they probably resolve
within themselves never to encourage
their species by buying any merchan
disc in which they could have an inter-
est The greed of the pillmaker for
such fame as he gets out of paint is
lamentable. In town he is putting up
his pill boards higher and higher that
he may see his name in larger letters.
Presently his signs will reach a height
of four stories and will make admirable
bOnfires on election night. But he
might spare us his clamors for support
in the country. There is some hope
from the municipal art societies that
are appearing i'll this land. 1t is of far
more consequence that they should
clean up the hideous litter, the dead
signs, the broken lampposts, the avn
ings, the showcases, the boxes and
barrels, the carts, the telegraph poles,
and so on, than to erect graceful stand
ards for tiagstatfs or park gates.
In the villages, too, there are i'm
provement societies that are doing much
to counterfeit the ignorance and indif
ference of the resident and stay the
devastations of the men with paint
pots. On the other side of the sea the
evil has reached a point where it re-
quires official suppression, and it is a
genuine comfort to know that one Ger
man hotel keeper has been fined for
placing an offensive wooden structure
beside the roadway and thereby
wounding the aesthetic feelings of the
public" 1t is of more consequence that
the thousands who live in the country
and 90 to the country should be free to
enjoy its beauties than it is that some
quack should sell carload of his trash.
Sporadic efforts have been made in
America to suppress and restrict the
operations of the sign painter, but they
are so local and so few that they hardly
count. Yet they are to be encouraged,
and their occasional success should in
spre the rest with hope. The growth
of taste is indicated in the better care
given to country gardens and lawns, to
the planting of trees in towns, to the
conversion of railroad stations from the
dreary little boxes of other days to
strong, handsome buildings with half
acre of grass and flowers about them,
to the ornamentation of houses, to the
saving of those charming wayside
growths of wild flowers and bushes that
the farmer is so apt to sweep away
when they are fairest, in the cOnstruc-
ton of churches and Libraries of more
than temporary character. So why not
the abolition of the dreadful daubs that
pretend the virtues of patent medicines?
An experiment in New York state is
full of promise. 1t has worked uneX-
pectedly we'll In the neighbOrhoOd of
Utica the farmers have been addressed
by prominent physician and official
on this point and have with almost
unanimity agreed to refuse permission
to the painters to distigure their prop
erty any longer. Some who had con-
tracts with quacks and sign painters
agreed not to renew them. Local good
roads associations have been appealed
to with like result, for they Can at
least tear down signs that have been
nailed to trees or fixed to rocks along
the highway, which, being public prop
erty, should be immune from such as
saults This DETACHMENT of estates de-
preciates their value it makes loCali-
ties undesirable for summer visitors; it
encourages further and more atrOCiOus
encroachments, sustalns presidents that
initiate against taste and are harmful
to personal right. 1t will be hard to
frame law that can exactly deal with
the DETACHMENT of scenery, since it is
not always easy to define scenery, but a
general Indignation against the methods
employed by certain advertisers will
tend in large measure to do away with
the nuisance.
Five Foot Soldiers.
The minimum height i'll the mikado's
army lisa fraction of an inch over feet,