A rogue graffiti artist has rebranded Romney, Texas, with the name of the Democratic incumbent.
Someone scrawled “Obama” in black, upper-case letters over a highway sign marking the unincorporated community in Eastland County about forty miles north of Brownwood. The town’s population barely cracked the double digits in 2000, when it numbered twelve people, according to Census data.
Carolyn Michnoff took the above photo of the highway sign and brought it to the attention of NBC 5, calling it “shameful” and “kind of rude.”
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram‘s Bill Hanna spoke with a nearby resident, Sandy Koonce, who said her ten-year-old daughter noticed the sign last Tuesday as they drove home after soccer practice. “Of course we have a lot of pranks around here,” Koonce said. “Kids are doing stuff all the time. You never know who would do something like this.”
J.W. White, the man who settled Romney, Texas, in 1880, named it after his hometown of Romney, West Virginia. Some 1,848 people lived in Romney, West Virginia, as of the 2010 census, but no similar incidents of vandalism have been reported there, according to city administrator Eileen Johnson. “We’ve had no vandalism like that at all,” she told the TM Daily Post.
Unincorporated communities named Romney also exist in Pennsylvania and Indiana, according to the United States Board on Geographic Names.
