Why did signs (and news headlines) from the late 1800s always put a period at the end? The livery stable shown here www.shorpy.com/node/5974 would be an example.
It wouldn’t make sense at the beginning.
Dang, oh well, Mods, cite me. But I’m not the one feeding the straight lines.
I remember seeing a talk on the history of advertising, and the presenter (Stan Freberg, I think) pointed out the first ad with a period at the end of the headline.
And check out the lack of kerning in the word “ALWAYS,” near the top.
Ah, you are an artist. It could be a cheap cut and paste job, or just a replication of the results from an old metal type setting system that had no special kerning slugs.
WTF is kerning?
Ah, okay. Now that I know what it is I can see it.
Perhaps because they are period pieces. . .
Often we seek reason in events, when human error is the cause. It is most likely that these signs are errors, with over-zealous use of punctuation.
It is probably the equivalent of the grocer’s apostrophe - the unnecessary use of the apostrophe in handwritten signs, such as “APPLE’S AND PEAR’S”.
That’s the way they did it then.
Why no periods now? Because that’s the way it’s done now.
Iirc the period denotes position. It’s the 1853rd year, hence 1853. I’ll see if I can dig up a quote.
Yeah, and why did everyone wear suits and hats? And what’s with all the horses everywhere? And holy crap, did they like facial hair in those days or what?
Ah… it’s a German thing; apparently “In German, the dot after a number marks an ordinal, e.g.: 1. = 1st, 2. = 2nd etc.” my bad… guess my recollection isn’t as good as I remember it to be. Damn those Germanic languages and their slight differences.
When I was a youngster, Popular Mechanics never used periods at the end of captions
Why
I’ll bet that “always” is an exaggeration. It would be more interesting to know in what circumstances periods were used and in what time period and in what parts of the country and when it ended and in what order and where it lasted as an anachronism and everything else.
Why would that be interesting? Because now the the answer is pretty much that it was the style then and later the style changed. That’s not interesting. The rest is such hard work for so little reward that I’m sure an academic historian has made it a specialty. 
…and you always will. You poor thing.
I think there should be a warning akin to linking to TVTropes or PDFs when someone defines of kerning. Spoiler box at the least. We’ve lost too many great people to asylums over the years.
Not just signs. The Nameplate of The New York Times used to end with a period:
It took a long time to get rid of it (it was there until 1967 (!)):
http://www.typophile.com/node/19590
http://buildinternet.com/2009/12/a-handful-of-fascinating-typography-tidbits/
For several years, I did kerning full-time for a type manufacturer. You know, when you set type to “metrics” or “optical,” someone has to sit there and actually make those decisions for every character pair in a font.
After a while you find yourself kerning a row of cars or trees. And yes, I wish I could totally destroy that part of my brain.
My printing experience doesn’t involve movable type, but was it even possible to kern a W next to an A (not to mention the L and the Y)? If each character was on a square block, how could you make the edges overlap as they do on a computer with a proportional font?
ALWAYS
That’s one of those weird words. If you’re seeing the above code in Courier, you can see the lack of kerning between the A and the Y…you don’t see it so much between the W and the A because the W is almost square.
They made metal slugs in different forms with notches in the corners. So A would have a notch in the top left corner, and the W would have a notch in the bottom right corner, and the slugs would fit together with an overlap. I think some type sets had some double character slugs for common combinations, like capital T and lower case a, e, o, and u. Of course the slugs weren’t squares, they were all different widths, so they were proportional.