Hi! My name is Christian Willis, and I collect signs manufactured by the Stonehouse Sign Company of Colorado. A couple of years after I started collecting insulators at the age of 9, I also started noticing and collecting danger signs — after all, I would typically see these go-withs at almost every insulator show I attended, and even antique shops. Specifically, the “danger in a red oval” drew my interest. Even more specifically, danger signs with a certain font were my favorite. It wasn’t until the late 1990s and the Internet that I learned more about who was behind these cool signs with the distinct font: Stonehouse Signs of Colorado. Much like collecting insulators, little did I know at the time how little of the surface I had scratched...
James Wesley (J.W.) Stonehouse was born in 1869. Like his father William, J.W. was a sign painter by trade—he got his start painting signs in the late 1890s to help fund his search for gold in the Victor, Colorado region. Around 1903, he made his way down to Douglas in the Arizona Territory to work his trade there, and also began on investing more in mining operations. During this period, he quickly recognized the need for standardized bell signals within the mines, and his signs were almost universally adopted.
Around 1910, he moved back to Colorado, and in 1914, J.W. formed the Stonehouse Steel Sign Company and moved to Denver. Seeing opportunity beyond mine safety, he was a founding member of the National Safety Council; his designs for the Danger, Caution, Notice, Think, and Safety First header panels are the basis for the ones we still see and recognize to this day. His signs were sold all over North America to electric companies, mines, railroads, hospitals, factories, government, and countless other industries. In 1926, the company was renamed to Stonehouse Signs, Inc., and in 1968 the company moved to Arvada, where it operated continuously by the same family until 2020, when the company was sold to ACP International (acpinternational.com).