When Mary Graf, owner of Grafic Signs, decided to move her family’s business from West Bridgewater to Wareham, she had no idea they were about to uncover a piece of Wareham's history, but that’s exactly what happened.

The Grafs decided to pull the existing siding off of their recently purchased building, formerly owned by Linn Prudential Real Estate, and redo it. As Mary’s son and a friend began to pull bits and pieces of the existing yellow siding off the building, they gradually started to notice something out of the ordinary hidden underneath.

“They were like, ‘something’s under here,’” said Graf from inside the building at 2586 Cranberry Highway Monday afternoon.

That something, as they eventually found out, was that the entire easterly facing wall of the building was covered with a hand-painted, original sign from way back in the pre-495 days for a year round/vacation community known as Tigerline Homes, known today as ‘Shangri La.’

Ironically, a modern-day sign-making business had discovered a sign from the past.

That sign belonged to the Linn family, the owners of Prudential Linn Insurance who also owned a construction company called Tigerline Homes, builders of the current Shangri La dating back to 1968.

Steve Linn, the current owner of Prudential Linn who now lives in San Diego, said he’s still connected to the area through Prudential Linn’s newer office at 2499 Cranberry Highway. When the sign was uncovered, one of the women from his office noticed it and promptly notified him of the unearthed sign on the side of the building he once owned, and prior to him, that his father Carl and mother Myrtle owned.

“One of my Real Estate Agents drove by and saw the renovation going on and took a picture of it for me,” said Linn, saying that it brought up emotions both good and bad for him.

“(His father Carl) loved what he did to provide new housing and a new place to live for first time buyers,” said Linn, “but I have mixed emotions. My reaction is happy and sad as seeing the picture gave me some great memories of my parents, but sad that they are now gone.”

Back then, the other business owned by the Linn’s was called Gold Cape Realty, and eventually, Steve Linn and his wife Anne joined the business in 1978, with it eventually becoming Prudential Linn Real Estate. But some time before then, his father decided to cover up the sign with some siding, preserving it like a fossil in bedrock, protected from the outside elements, only to have the Grafs find it more than 30 years later.

Graf said that when they discovered the sign last Friday, they found something else as well. A family of carpenter ants had been eating away at the wall, old sign included, and if they hadn’t pulled off the outer layer, they might have been looking at some serious damage to both the structure itself as well as to the historic sign.

Since the sign revealed itself last Friday, Keith Harrington, who is Graf’s son, said that people have been pulling up and asking questions about it, some reminiscing of a time that the sign was a very visible fixture in Wareham as Cranberry Highway was even more so “the gateway to Cape Cod” before 495 was put in.

“A lot of people like it,” said Harrington. “They’ve been stopping in every day since we took the siding down.”

“It’s very awesome,” added Graf, noting that she and her family decided it would be best to cover the sign back up as to not leave it exposed to the elements and at the same time, to finish the siding-job that they initially set out to do in the first place. “I don’t want to cover it, but if I don’t cover it, it will completely fall apart. The nice thing is, at least we’re not destroying it.”

Graf said that as a sign-making business, it was fitting they discovered it, and they’ll continue to honor the historical merit of the Tigerline Sign by creating some “grafics" from the pictures they took of it. She said they’ll display the image and potentially offer prints of it up for sale if anyone is interested.

“Being in the sign business, for me, it was a real treasure of a sign,” she said. “Plus, in another 50 or 80 years, someone else will be able to discover it.”