Someone Carved 'O.W.F.G.' Into My Picnic Table. Then I Found It in 39 Other Counties.

It started, like most things on this website, with a reader email and a sandwich.

The email came from a guy in Zanesville who'd noticed something odd while eating lunch at a rest stop off I-70: the letters O.W.F.G. carved into the picnic table, topped with a crude little bell. He thought it was a gang tag, or maybe a radio station. Then he saw the same mark on a footbridge in Newark. Then on the back of a desk at a church rummage sale.

"Am I being followed?" he asked.

Reader: you are not being followed. You've been sitting on a piece of Ohio history. So have a lot of other people.

The Bell That Started It All

The initials trace back to the Ohio Wick, Fixture & Glass Company, a Columbus outfit incorporated in 1921 that made — depending on which ledger you consult — candleholders, parlor lamps, and eventually a short-lived line of mahogany smoking stands. The company folded in 1931, a casualty of the Depression and, according to one newspaper account, "a warehouse fire of spectacular incompetence."

What OWFG left behind was a logo: a hand bell above the initials, stamped on every catalog, every shipping crate, every promotional ashtray handed out to hardware stores from Toledo to Portsmouth.

And here's where it gets good. According to a 1927 Ohio State Journal clipping we found in the Columbus Metropolitan Library's genealogy room, the company ran a promotional contest. Salesmen, delivery drivers, and apparently quite a few overenthusiastic employees were encouraged to chalk the OWFG bell "in a conspicuous public place" as guerrilla advertising. The clipping promises a $25 prize for the best placement. There's no record of who won.

There is, however, plenty of evidence that people never stopped.

Forty Counties and Counting

Once we knew what to look for, the reports rolled in. A bell and initials etched into a school desk in Defiance County. A bell scratched into the railing of a covered bridge in Fairfield County — that one dated, suspiciously, "1954." A bell on a barn door in Preble County so weathered it's practically a ghost.

Our current tally, thoroughly unscientific and entirely dependent on your submissions: 40 counties. We've mapped them on a corkboard in the office that our editor describes as "increasingly alarming."

The big open question is the gap. The company died in 1931, but the carvings clearly span decades. The best theory comes from retired history teacher Marlene Voss of Chillicothe, who collects OWFG advertising pieces — she owns a bell-shaped letter opener and a lamp base with the logo still intact.

"It became a game," she told us over the phone. "Kids copied it. Scouts copied it. It was Ohio's first viral meme, honestly. Somebody carves it, somebody else sees it and has to put it somewhere too. Nobody remembers why. That's how a lot of folk traditions work."

The Collectors Keeping the Flame (Literally, It's a Candle Company)

There's a small but devoted circle of OWFG collectors — Voss estimates maybe two dozen serious ones statewide. They trade lamp bases and catalog reprints at the Springfield antique shows and in a Facebook group called "Bell Ringers of Ohio," which sounds like a church thing and is very much not.

The holy grail? A surviving smoking stand from the 1930 line. Only three are confirmed to exist, and one of them reportedly lives in a basement rec room in Mansfield, being used as a TV tray. The collector who owns it has refused all interview requests, which, respect.

Help Us Fill in the Map

So here's our ask, and it's a fun one: have you seen the bell?

Snap a photo of any OWFG carving you spot — picnic tables, desks, fence posts, bathroom stalls (we'll blur the location of that last category, but we still want to know). Send it to us with the county. Every submission gets logged, mapped, and, for the best find of the summer, earns a very unofficial prize: a hand-drawn OWFG bell sticker from our editor's art bin.

Because this is the whole reason this website has the name it does. Somebody asked us once what O.H. Wa F.G. stands for, and the honest answer is: nobody here fully agrees. But after this story, we like to think we're keeping a 100-year-old inside joke alive. Somebody carved a bell into your picnic table for a candle company that's been dead for ninety years.

The least we can do is notice.