My Yard Sign Saga

Last week I put a Trump/Pence 2020 sign on our property alongside a main highway here in the town of Mount Desert, Maine. A few days later our neighbor put signs on their property supporting the Democrat Party candidates. In good American tradition, we were both exercising our First Amendment rights to express our views freely. For a day or two everything seemed civil and peaceful. Then it happened. I’m not accusing our neighbor, but all their signs are still intact, as they should be. Our sign supporting the re-election of Trump and Pence disappeared. An initial search confirmed that it was not anywhere near where it had been placed on our property.

I reported the incident to the local police, acknowledging that I did not expect them to be able to do much since I was unable to identify the perpetrator. Nonetheless, they were glad to take the report and informed me that there had been a few other similar incidents, all focused on removing signs supporting Trump. Later I went back to the place where the sign had been and conducted a wider search in the woods. There was the sign, hung up in a bush almost 100 feet into the woods. Someone had thrown it as far as they could. I updated the police report, telling them the sign had been found, and then I put it up again on our property.

The next day the sign was missing again, but the wire frame that held the sign was still in place. The vandal had removed the sign from its supports and this time took the sign even further into the woods and wedged it into the crack in a tree trunk. Once more I succeeded in refastening the sign to its wire supports and installing it in a visible place alongside the highway. Sometime within the next three to four hours, the sign disappeared again, leaving the wire frame behind still standing.

A search of the woods finally discovered a corner of the sign sticking out from under a dead log. This time the sign had been folded, damaged and soiled. Someone was going to a lot of trouble to suppress my First Amendment rights of free speech.

As I was walking back along the side of the highway, a police car pulled up next to me, stopped and turned on his flashing lights so that other cars could pass. The officer, from the Bangor, Maine police department, was as courteous, professional and considerate as one could ever hope for. It turned out that he was the same officer who had taken my original complaint over the phone several days earlier. He stopped just to see if I was the same person he had spoken with and to ask how things were. I filled him in on the two additional incidents which he said he would add to the initial report to update the record. He said that if I am ever able to identify the perpetrator the police will be happy to file the criminal charges. We have not yet installed a remote security camera in the woods overlooking the sign, but that may become a necessity if this continues. In the meantime, the officer and I discussed various ways to discourage people from removing the sign, including posting a warning notice saying “Private Property – No Trespassing”. One technique was to coat the sign with Vaseline and to put something in the Vaseline that a person would not want to get on their hands. Another technique was to soak the ground around the sign with the coyote urine spray used to keep deer out of the garden. It stinks! I doubt anyone will want to walk through an area soaked with it. So far, 24 hours have passed since I put the sign back and it is still there.

If anyone has any good suggestions of techniques to keep people from removing or damaging our yard signs, please add you comments after this post. Apparently, this problem is more widespread around the country than I had realized. I’m sure others would appreciate suggestions how to protect our First Amendment rights to free speech by placing pro-Trump signs on our property.

I will not be silenced, and I will continue to express my strong belief that our country needs President Trump to be re-elected for four more years.