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Published in The Seattle Times online on June 5, 2025
and in Pacific NW Magazine of the printed Times on June 8, 2025

Road trip! AAA’s early 20th century arrows showed us the way

By Clay Eals

Talk about signs of the times …

Most of us know that automobiles rumbled into general use roughly 120 years ago. However, we don’t think much about the roads on which they rolled. Initially, many were unmarked, and without GPS or phone apps, how did drivers know which path to choose? Printed maps helped. But what if you were mapless and came to a fork in the road? While governmental road signs guide us today, it was not always thus.

Enter the nation’s upstart auto clubs, some of which affiliated with the national American Automobile Association (AAA or Triple-A), founded in Chicago in 1902. Soon afterward in our state came the launch of what became the Auto Club of Western Washington, organizational ancestor of today’s AAA Washington.

Over the years, the club advocated for quality byways and safety education and became known for emergency road service, maps and travel advice. But through the mid-1940s, it also built countless directional signs and installed them at key intersections.

The club installed its first signs in 1906, planning 500 pointers within 30 miles of Seattle. Twelve years later, the club reported that “at least” 1,500 signs had been placed on 3,200 miles of roads and streets in western Washington. “This, however, is just a start.”

The white-painted signs were instantly visible and recognizable — a bouquet of arrows pointing every which-way, identifying places near and far, with numbers indicating mileage. An accompanying diamond-shaped sign identified the club, an ingenious brand for a captive driving audience.

In both urban and rural settings, the signs became ubiquitous. Guidance and safety were an obvious part of their motivation and appeal. But an equal factor, the club said in 1920, was aesthetics: “We want to rid our splendid scenic highways of the signs on trees and stumps and rocks along the right-of-way, which distract so seriously from their beauty.”

Pointing out everything from telephone booths and scout camps to speed limits and speed traps (!), the signs drew “innumerable compliments” for “assisting the stranger.” The club spent $300,000 on sign installations from 1916 to 1945, when signage became the legal responsibility of cities, counties and the state.

The club maintained sign shops and took pride in photographing the signs when installing them. Many surviving prints, however, bear no dates or documentation of their locations.

Even so, it’s fun to view them today. Eyeing their posted place names and doing the mileage math, we can speculate about the intersections where they once stood sentinel to show us the way.

WEB EXTRAS

Big thanks to Bob Carney, Cindi Barker and especially Sam Murphy, Mellani McAleenan and Kelsey Bumsted of AAA Washington for their invaluable help with this installment!

To see Clay Eals‘ 360-degree video of the “Now” prospect and compare it with the “Then” photos, and to hear this column read aloud by Clay, check out our Seattle Now & Then 360 version of the column.

Below, you also will find 5 additional photos, 2 AAA Journeys magazine stories from 2004 by Paul Dorpat and Jean Sherrard, and 1 historical clip from The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer online archive (available via Seattle Public Library), Newspapers.com, Washington Digital Newspapers and other sources, all of which were helpful in the preparation of this column.