"Cow town adverts?" Topic

In UK its common to see product placements painted directly onto the brick walls of older buildings (typically those that were the corner shop/grocer etc once) I've never seen this in Old West photos, did it happen?

Yes, that was also very common on buildings in the Old West and even into the 1900's here in the US. If you drive through areas where there are brick buildings still standing from that era you can still see some of the painted ads visible, although very faded.

Teresa

It depends on where & when. In the 1870s for instance, places like Dodge City were still mostly a city of tents, sod buildings & few wooden buildings. Most of the permanent buildings were constructed once a railhead was established or a reliable shipping route. However, Chicago & St. Louis would have had the painted adverts.

The adverts you refer to would have been seen in Dallas or Ft. Worth in the 1880s once the railroad had come through. If you are gaming some of the "towns" that were erected following the buffalo hunters for instance, there would be few painted buildings. Most of these towns were abandoned when the hunters moved on.

So if your setting is near a railroad, navigable river, or a reliable shipping route, the buildings would have been painted & certainly there would be adverts painted on the buildings. If your setting is on the frontier, a town that has sprung up around a mine, or following the buffalo hunts, it is less likely that the buildings will have adverts or even a coat of paint.

Note also that when modelling the signs, those in the
Southwest (mainly Texas, New Mexico, parts of Nevada), where the wind would catch sand, and with strong sunshine, the signs would become quickly weathered and sun-bleached… I usually do these with a whited-out shade, and then hit them with sandpaper..

Here are some examples from Montana. Most actually date from the 1900-1920 period as older signs were painted over. These wwere painted where they could be seen, so usually on taller buildings or those who had a side facing the tracks or main road.

link

picture

picture

picture

Just watched WINCHESTER '73 (Matinee on C4) In Dodge City a saloon has SALOON painted straight onto the planking (quite neat) a land office has a bellcote tower (very distinctive if I replicate that) and some of the facades are rounded rather than angular. The town at the end seems to be made of bare mud bricks, rather than plastered.

The movie story takes place in 1876. The Dodge City in the movie is plausible in that the railhead had reached Dodge by then. The town at the end is supposed to be Tascosa in the Texas panhandle. At that time the buildings in Tascosa would have been a few wood frame buildings & most made of sod. Tascosa was founded in 1875. The landscape at the end of the movie is all wrong for the Texas panhandle & much more like parts of Arizona, Utah, or Nevada, so the buildings in the Hollywood Tascosa were probably adobe brick.

Oooh, just found a reference where Hispanic shepherds built a few adobe huts in Tascosa.

My West games are set in a kind of Arizona…

Incidentally in the Billy Bob ALAMO the Texian houses look like planks or beams set into adobe- am I right?