And they’re all made by hand at a state Department of Environmental Conservation sign shop in Northville on the southern edge of the Adirondacks. The small team at the shop is also responsible for all other signs on state land in eastern and upstate New York, including at boat launches, campsites, trails and wild forests.

They also make decals for state vehicles like Forest Ranger trucks and trailers. Another DEC sign shop in Godfrey Point makes signage for state land and vehicles in central and western New York.

Supervisor George Bailey begins a tour of the Northville shop where the signs begin their journey.

“This is our carpenter shop, so I tell everybody this is where everything starts here at the DEC office,” Bailey explains, walking past big piles of boards and scraps of wood. The sign shop prioritizes using local lumber as often as possible.

Judy Edwards and Colin Capon work part-time at the DEC sign shop in Northville. (Provided photo — Emily Russell/NCPR)

Once the DEC headquarters in Albany approves an order for new signs, Bailey and his team get to work. “We take and we’ll figure out what we’re going to need for materials,” he says.

Bailey grew up across the street from the DEC sign shop in Northville. He started working here in 1986, a tenure so long that he measures his time against the woodworking tools here.

“That saw was here before I got here and that table saw was here before I got here,” Bailey says, “and this panel saw came after I was here.”

The DEC sign shop makes thousands of signs each year. Once each sign is cut and sanded, some are shaped using a hand router, a power tool that can also carve words and letters into wood.

After the signs take their shape, they’re ready to be painted, which brings us to the next stop on the tour.

George Bailey, seen here, is supervisor of the DEC sign shop in Northville. (Provided photo — Emily Russell/NCPR)

“This is our paint room,” Bailey says. “This is where all the painting is done here. We have an ID sign for Luzerne Public Campground right there,” he adds, pointing to a large, brown sign leaning up against the wall.

The letters aren’t routed into these signs. Instead, they’re adhered to them in yellow vinyl. The shop has a big printer that produces sheets of vinyl letters and numbers.

Andy Licciardi is working on a stack of numbered signs to hang at campsites. He starts with a sharp blade. “We cut them out of this big sheet of vinyl,” Licciardi explains, as he cuts out the numbers on the vinyl, “and then we weed out all the vinyl and reveal the numbers and the border and then we tape them up, and stick them on a sign.”

Licciardi uses a flat-edged tool to ensure the yellow vinyl letters really stick, scraping the tool up and down the sign.

This part of the shop is like a tight-knit factory. Behind Licciardi are two people wearing white aprons. They dip their rollers into a tray of brown paint. Usually, they say, there’d be music playing back here.

“Judy is a bit of a dancer,” explains Colin Capon. “I have to have my music, it keeps me going,” Judy Edwards says.

Edwards and Capon work here part-time, painting signs in the winter and mowing lawns and picking up trash at the local DEC boat launches in the summer. Capon and Edwards say their coworkers are great and the gig is good.

“It’s outdoors in the summer, it’s indoors all winter painting,” Edwards says. “At least you’re doing something. It’s not a job where you’re sitting down doing nothing. We’re busy.”

“Yeah, it keeps us busy, keeps us off the streets,” Capon says, with a laugh.

There’s something unique about this place. It’s not just that everyone here seems to get along. It feels like they really like what they do, maybe because a lot of the work is still done by hand, though some of it has moved online.

The next stop on our tour is a little office near the paint shop, where we find Patrick Edwards working on a campsite map. He’s using computer software to fill in the missing pieces.

“I have to make some of these little icons for the map here and I’m just trying to do that,” Edwards says, “and trying to get it sized right so I can fit it in there somewhere. I’m not sure where I’m going to put it.”

Those icons will show where things like the restrooms and showers are. They’ll then be printed in vinyl and stuck onto the large wooden campsite map.

Edwards grew up in Northville and his dad was the supervisor of the DEC sign shop in the 1980s. Edwards says he’s learned a lot over the years from his own supervisor, George Bailey, like what makes a good, effective sign.

“The layout and design really matter. It’s something you don’t think about a lot and thankfully George has been here to teach me and train your eye for that sort of thing,” Edwards says.

There’s a big difference between a good sign and a bad one. A clear, simple, well-designed sign can ensure hikers stay on the trail, and point people in the right direction for a boat launch or a canoe carry.

The final stop on our tour is a big machine just outside Bailey’s office. “This here is going to change a lot of what we do,” Bailey says, standing by a massive router the size of a ping-pong table. It has blue levers at one end and a large carving device hovering over the middle. Bailey says the machine router will change how signs here take shape.

“We won’t be hand-routing this stuff, we won’t be hand-cutting all this stuff. This router should do all that stuff. It should take and do all these serrations on all these boards.”

Before you think a machine router will take jobs and make the people here obsolete, Bailey says that won’t be the case. This is a small shop; the handful of people here do a lot of different jobs.

Bailey wraps up the tour in his office, where a big “Entering Adirondack Park” sign leans up against the wall. Patrick Edwards spent about a month putting it together and Bailey is clearly proud of the work.

“To me, that’s just a beautiful job. I hate the fact that it’s going to have to leave my office here someday,” Bailey says, “but Pat did a beautiful job on that and when I leave, Pat will be taking over for me just like I took over for his dad.”

Traditions run deep in this shop. Some will change when the machine router comes online, but a lot will stay the same. Like wooden signs, this shop will likely be around for decades to come.