|
Hillside letters or mountain monograms are a form of geoglyph (more specifically hill figures) common in the American West, consisting of large single letters, abbreviations, or messages emblazoned on hillsides, typically created and maintained by schools or towns. There are approximately 500 of these geoglyphs, ranging in size from a few feet to hundreds of feet tall. They form an important part of the western cultural landscape, where they function as symbols of school pride and civic identity, similar to water towers and town slogans on highway "welcome to" signs in other regions.〔Evelyn Corning. 2007. Hillside Letters A to Z: A Guide to Hometown Landmarks. Mountain Press Publishing.〕 ==History== A long-standing myth that hillside letters were built to identify communities from the air for early pilots who air-dropped mail is untrue.〔Guy Rocha. 2004. Hillside Letters; In Plain Sight But Not Intended for Planes. Sierra Sage.〕 The first three mountain monograms built were constructed to end rivalries between different graduating classes at universities. Letters have also been erected to celebrate winning teams, to commemorate the building of high schools, in memory of local community members, and as Boy Scout projects. The first hillside letter built was a C in March 1905. It was constructed out of concrete and placed on Charter Hill overlooking the UC Berkeley. The UC Berkeley classes of 1907 and 1908 proposed this project as a means of ending the rivalry and the unruly physical encounters that had become a part of their annual rush each spring. The UC Berkeley yearbook would later record that the two classes would go down in the history of the University as those who sacrificed their class spirit for love of their alma mater.〔James J. Parsons. 1988. Hillside Letters in the Western Landscape. Landscape 30 (1): 15–23〕 A few weeks following the building of Berkeley’s C, the class rivalry of the sophomores and freshmen at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City produced a hillside U. The following year, Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, proposed and surveyed the first three-lettered hillside emblem BYU, but reduced it to the single letter Y after realizing the amount of labor involved. The M for the Miners of the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado, became the nation’s fourth hillside letter in 1908, and it has been illuminated every night since the early 1930s. A few years later, high schools began building hillside letters; the first one was a T for Tintic High School in Eureka, Utah, built in 1912. By the 1920s and 1930s, letters were being rapidly constructed across the West. Although the pace has slowed since then, newly constructed letters continue to appear today. Meanwhile, many letters are fading due to lack of maintenance (especially in cases where the school that created the letter has closed), or have been removed outright due to environmental concerns or changing aesthetic preferences. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Hillside letters」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|