A barn advertisement is an outdoor advertisement painted onto the exterior of a roadside barn. Advertisers take advantage of the barns' prominence in rural landscapes, paying their owners for the right to paint and maintain logos and slogans on them.[1] Painters of barn advertisements and other murals are known as "wall dogs".[2] Once a common form of billboard advertising in the Midwestern and Southeastern United States during the early– to mid–20th century, barn advertisements have faded into obscurity, as many of these rural ghost signs fall into disrepair, along with the structures that bear them.
Advertisers
Common barn advertisers include local roadside attractions, restaurants, and chewing tobacco manufacturers.
The Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company is credited with popularizing the medium. The company began advertising their products on the sides of buildings in 1890. By 1925, they had moved to advertising on Mail Pouch Barns. At the program's height in the early 1960s, some 20,000 barns in 22 states displayed Mail Pouch advertising,[1] with the greatest number in Ohio. Most of the barns were painted by Harley Warrick. Competitors such as Red Man and Hillside Tobacco also painted barns in smaller numbers.[3]
In the early 1940s, Clark Byers painted barns and their roofs for Rock City near Chattanooga, Tennessee, often with messages promising travelers the chance to see seven states from atop Lookout Mountain. Byers painted advertisements for the attraction on over 900 barn roofs in 19 states.[4]
Regulation
In 1965, Congress passed the Highway Beautification Act, which regulated and in some cases removed billboards from the sides of federally funded highways. Barn advertisements were also affected by this legislation, leading owners to paint over them, until public outcry led to a 1974 amendment that specifically exempted them as "folk heritage barns".[1] The National Historic Barn Preservation Act of 2001 protects barns 50 years or older from demolition and funds education programs about these structures.
Method
The advertisements are sketched then painted freehand, with the painter standing on a scaffolding platform.[11]
See also
- Out-of-home advertising
- Quilt trail
Further reading
- A history of the Ohio Bicentennial Barns licensed by the Ohio Bicentennial Commission.
External links
- "Barn Painting", interview with Hagan about Warrick on All Things Considered
References
- Carole Gilbert Brown. Demolition uncovers Mail Pouch ad Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Block Communications, 2008-07-24^
- Bicentennial Barns Madison County, New York, Planning Department, 2006, retrieved January 1, 2015^
- Geoffrey Nunberg. The Way We Talk Now: Commentaries on Language and Culture