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2 days ago  |  Advertorial  |  Lorna Prewitt

"After 47 years, they're taking the shop down. These are the last ones I'll ever carve." — Orval (73) is selling the final pieces of his Main Street collection at a special price.

For 47 years, Orval Coulter carved and lettered the shop signs of Corry, Pennsylvania — and held on to the wood his father put away to dry in the 1950s. Now the 73-year-old is closing the workshop his family has run since 1951, and the last of that wood has gone into five miniature storefronts: the Main Street he grew up on, the way it looked in autumn and the way it looked every October. When these are gone, the lumber room is empty and there is nobody left to cut them.

Corry, September. The workshop sits on the north side of Main Street, in a brick storefront with COULTER SIGN CO. still gold-leafed across the glass. It smells of linseed oil, turpentine and fresh-cut wood. On the bench sits a half-finished bakery front — the awning carved, the lettering not yet painted. Orval Coulter works the way he has since 1979. But this is his last autumn here.

"They're taking the block," he says, wiping a gouge on his apron. "North side of Main — this building and the four next to it. First week of November, they told me. My father unlocked this door in 1951. I'd be lying if I said I've been sleeping well."

The borough is clearing the north side of the street for parking — for the grocery store that opened out on the highway nine years ago. Orval looks past the window at the surveyors' orange paint on the sidewalk. "Five buildings," he says. "For forty parking spaces. That is the trade."

Then he says the thing that seems to sit heavier. "And nobody pays for a cut sign anymore. It's all vinyl now. A machine cuts it, a kid squeegees it on, four summers and the sun has eaten it. Forty-seven years of a trade, and it just quietly went away while I was standing in it."

47 years, 311 storefronts — and a lumber room that can't be refilled

Orval has counted. In 47 years he has carved and lettered 311 storefronts across four counties in Pennsylvania and New York. Banks, feed stores, the scoreboard at the ball field. Gold leaf on glass for the pharmacy.

"My father bought wood the way other men bought land," he says, and opens the door to the back room. Boards stand on edge from floor to ceiling, each one chalked on the end with the year it came in. 1958. 1963. 1971. "Butternut, mostly. He'd buy a whole tree's worth and stand it up to dry. You can't do that now. You can't even buy it now."

He is right. Butternut has been all but wiped out across North America by a canker that took hold in the 1960s. What is left sits in old lumber rooms like Emil Coulter's.

"A board in there has been drying sixty years," Orval says. "It cuts like soap and it holds an edge on a letter half a millimeter wide. New wood doesn't do that. New wood fuzzes on you."

It started in 2015, when Hoffman's Hardware closed after 62 years. Orval had carved their sign in 1984. For Vern Hoffman's last day he built him a small version of the storefront — the awning, the two windows, and the sign, lettered the way he had lettered the real one. Vern, 81, stood on the sidewalk and cried.

Two weeks later the florist asked for hers. Then the bakery, then the bookshop on the corner.

"I never sat down and planned a collection," he says. "I just kept going down the street."

Some of it he carved twice. Every October, Main Street dressed up for the Corry Halloween walk, and for forty years it was Orval who lettered the temporary signs that went in the windows: the bookshop became the Boo Bookstore, the florist became the Haunted Florist, the post office became the Phantom Post Office.

"When I finally sat down to carve the street, I couldn't decide which version I missed more," he says. "So I did both."

In 2019 the harvest fair asked him to bring a table. He took eleven storefronts and was writing names on the back of an envelope by noon.

What makes Orval's storefronts so different

It isn't the little awnings or the pumpkins on the step. It's the lettering, and the way it gets into the wood — the incised-and-painted method his father taught him, the way shop signs were made before a plotter could do it in four minutes.

The incised build: every sign on every piece is cut into the wood, not printed on top of it. Orval sets the V-tool at the start of the letter and walks it through in one pass, floods the groove with 1-Shot lettering enamel — the same paint that went on real shop windows — then tones the face around it with a brush. A single storefront takes him the better part of two days, from the first chalk line to the moment he turns it under the bench lamp and checks that every letter still catches.

"Some of these have been in the same window for ten Octobers"

Orval lifts a wooden box onto the bench. It is stuffed with letters and photographs people have printed out and mailed. "They send a picture of the window," he says. "Same window, different year. That's how I know they're still up." He pulls one out, dated 2018: "Dear Mr. Coulter, the bookshop has been on our hall table for four Octobers now and my husband won't let me put it away in November. He says it looks right there."

A factory stamps out thousands in a shift. Orval carves one, paints it, and turns it under the bench lamp to see whether the signs read before it goes in a box.

Under the bench he keeps a crate he calls the nothing-under-there box. It's full of things people have carried in hoping he could fix them: a miniature cottage with the shop name peeling off in a strip, a village piece with a split plastic roof, a "carved" sign that turned out to be a printed sticker on a molded blank.

"I can't repair any of it," he says. "Not because it's hard. Because there's no cut under there. The letter isn't in the wood, it's sitting on it. Scrape the sticker off and it's smooth gray plastic underneath. There was never a shop there at all."

The end of an era — and one last chance

At the end of October, Orval closes the shop for good — days before the wrecking crew arrives. "There's nobody to hand it to," he says. "Nobody wants to spend years learning a trade a machine does in four minutes. And even if they did — there'd be no wood to teach them on."

Over the 26 months since the borough's notice came, he worked through the last of his father's boards. Every usable piece went into a storefront: 341 in total, across the five stretches of Main Street he wanted to keep. The racks in the back room are bare now. The butternut is gone, and he will not be cutting any new.

So that they find good homes before Halloween, he has done something he never did at the fairs: set one clear price on every piece. At the harvest fairs, these sold for $69. For this last collection, they are $39.

"My grandson Tanner handles the online part," he says, laughing. "I can gold-leaf a bank window. Don't ask me to work a website."

It was Tanner who photographed every piece and put the shop together over a single weekend. "He told me if the street's gone, somebody ought to at least be able to look at it."

What sets Orval's storefronts apart

• 100% workshop-made: Every storefront is carved, painted and finished by Orval himself — no molds, no production line.
• Sixty-year-old butternut: Cut from boards his father stood up to dry between 1958 and 1971. That wood is not available today at any price.
• Letters cut into the wood: Every sign is incised with a V-tool and painted in the groove with 1-Shot enamel. Tilt it under a lamp and the letters change. Printed ones don't.
• Paint that sits in the cut: The enamel is flooded into the groove, not laid on the surface, so the lettering does not lift at the edge the way printed signs do.
• Weighted base: The mass sits low, so a knock on the shelf doesn't put it on the floor.
• Not just for Halloween: Two of the five are the street in plain autumn. Most owners leave them out well past November — a windowsill, a hall table, a bookshelf, right through the dark months.
• Five storefronts, twelve shops: Boo Boulevard, the Halloween Bookshop, the Bookshop as it really stood, the Witch Hat Café, and the Fall Market on the square.
• Limited: 341 pieces from the last of Emil Coulter's wood. Once they're gone, there are no more.

What real customers say about Orval's storefronts

"A gift for the people you actually care about"

What makes one of Orval's storefronts such a good gift is where the wood came from. "You're handing somebody a piece of a street that isn't there anymore," he says, "cut out of a board my father put away before I was driving."

His customer Denise K. (44) from Erie agrees: "I gave the bookshop one to my sister for her birthday and told her the wood was older than both of us. She went quiet and just kept turning it over in her hands. Knowing a 73-year-old man cut every letter of it by hand — it stops being a decoration. I ordered the café one for myself two days later."

Where can you buy Orval's storefronts?

They are available exclusively through this page. Tanner runs Orval's small shop at Backroad Goods, and it is the only place you will get an original piece out of the Corry workshop.

Be careful elsewhere: on Amazon, Temu and similar sites, cheap look-alikes have started showing up. In a photograph they look close. In your hand they are molded plastic with the shop names printed on the surface. Tilt one under a lamp — the lettering won't move, because there's nothing cut into it.

Every order comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If a piece isn't right for your home, one email to info@backroadgoods.com is all it takes to get your money back.