"Jesus is Coming" Sign. US 119, Cumberland, Kentucky

This blocky, heart-shaped sign is one of thousands that Henry Harrison Mayes erected along U.S. roadways. Mayes was a Kentuckian who dedicated his life to roadside evangelism after surviving a mining accident as a young man. The signs, made using homemade wooden molds and steel rods, stood eight feet tall and weighed 1,500 pounds.

As highways expanded throughout the 1950s and 1960s, many of Mayes’s structures were torn down. Mayes also ran afoul of the American Automobile Association, who testified that the signs were a deadly distraction for drivers who encountered them just before crashing their cars.