Southern Tier Expressway Sign Tee - Tan on Vintage Brown

The Southern Tier Expressway is the highway that runs through our hometown of Jamestown, NY, and across the southern part of New York State along the border with Pennsylvania, crossing over the Allegheny Reservoir, and directly through the "reservation" land that is the home of the people known as the Seneca Nation of Indians. This area and some of it's history was immortalized by Johnny Cash in his song "As Long as the Grass Shall Grow", about the treaties that were violated when the Kinzua Dam was created by the Federal Government to flood the Allegheny River Valley, and the Seneca ancestral homelands and burial grounds along the riverbank, creating the reservoir.

This highway was always known as NYS Route 17 until sometime the late 1990's, when it became Interstate 86, but these signs have remained. As a kid riding in the car on the highway, you never got to see these signs up close or got much time to really take in the image, because the car was moving so fast. It wasn't until I was a teenager who had seen this signage thousands of times before I realized that the shape was the silhouette of a person's face, with a headband and braids, as a reference to the Seneca People. My brain had always interpreted the sign as some sort of map image for some reason.

There is a lot more to be said about all of this stuff, and we intend to say a lot of it, but the description area of this tee shirt that we're trying to sell you is probably not the place. Please keep an eye on our (forthcoming) blog for more. These tees are screenprinted by hand with high-quality durable inks on nice mediumweight Gildan "Dryblend" Unisex imported 50/50 tees.