Welcoming Wimberley again

If you drive in from San Marcos on Ranch Road 12, right before the Blanco River Bridge the “Welcome to Wimberley” sign has done its job for decades. Welcoming locals and tourists alike, the sign was one of the many things that didn’t make it through February of 2021.

Keep Wimberley Beautiful, which maintains the three “Welcome to Wimberley” signs around town, asked the community a simple question. The resounding answer was that the eventual replacement should be as similar to the original as possible.

That is where Austin Vaughan, one of many people who volunteered to help replace the sign, stepped in.

The 2005 graduate of Wimberley High School works for his family’s sign company, Signcrafters, in San Marcos. They are also the company who designed and is installing the city’s new wayfinding signs.

“I emailed them directly and offered to help them on the design part of it, if they wanted to go back towards the original design,” Vaughan said.

However, there were no original plans. A few years ago, the original sign was actually replaced. While the most recent version was similar, it wasn’t an exact replica of the sign Vaughan had grown up driving by. So he and Keep Wimberley Beautiful began seeking out photos of the original sign.

“We took our time looking at a couple different versions, and decided which one looked the best,” Vaughan said. “So there were a lot of people that had pictures of the previous sign. We thought that the original look of the sign did it best, so I tried to replicate the original look.”

Gathering photos for accuracy, it appeared the letters of the original sign were handmade. While they were similar to many typical fonts, none seemed to match exactly as if the builder took a bit of artistic license with the shape of each letter. After finding a photo that was level and squarely in front of the sign, Vaughan put the picture into Photoshop and traced each letter for accuray to create the outline of what would be used to cut each piece. This sign would be as close to the original as possible.

“It’s not so much that the sign represents all that is Wimberley. It has just been a part of Wimberley for so long that you’ve got to try to preserve the town’s image where you can, especially a town like Wimberley that isn’t necessarily on the cutting edge of change. It was good to preserve that image of the town, because you know it’s just so well recognized.”

He designed the letters, gratis, and Signcrafters cut it. Keep Wimberley Beautiful, the city and a lot of others are responsible for the materials. Then last week, Keep Wimberley Beautiful volunteers Jim and Holly Miller, Jamie Pettit and Lin Weber went out and pieced the sign together. Pictures can be seen on KWB’s Facebook page assembling the finished sign.

And just like that, a small icon of our little village is doing its job, now repaired and welcoming visitors to the valley again.