Minton United Church sign stolen
By Matthew McCully
Trevor McKinven had some choice words to share about whoever stole the sign from in front of Minton United Church in Hatley Township.
It went missing some time in the night on Saturday, June 3. Locals woke up the following morning to find only the two posts on which the sign had been mounted.
“The pre-meditation is off the charts,” McKinven explained.
The church, located at the corner of University and Minton Hill roads in Hatley Township is, to say the least, off the beaten path. “It has to be somebody that takes that route,” he said.
And it’s not as though the sign were mowed down in some random act of vandalism.
Removing the six-foot wide, hand-painted (by McKinven roughly a decade ago) heavy wooden sign would have required planning, and tools, and more than one person.
That’s an awful lot of effort to steal, McKinven explained, were the intention to paint over it to use on some other business. It’s not a standard shape either, the artist said, so anyone hoping to use it again would need to re-cut it so that the oval shape and unique swirls were removed.
McKinven, who grew up just a few hundred feet away from the church, said the theft “feels like a loss of dignity,” and considers the act an assault on the history and spirit of the building and what it represents.
Local Brian Conner, first to spot the missing sign, and his father Wendall, on the Minton United Church board, told The Record on Thursday that they didn’t bother to file a police report.
