Abandoned and Forgotten

by Elizabeth Winter

Title

Abandoned and Forgotten

Artist

Elizabeth Winter

Medium

Photograph - Photography

Description

A Ferric oxide (rust), a primary component of red paint, is inexpensive and this appealed to the thrifty farmers of New England and New York State. Red is the predominant barn color in that region. Natives of these areas were the early settlers of the Great Lakes states migrating there via the Erie Canal and the Lakes. This red barn tradition may also be true in central and northern Wisconsin and Minnesota.

A Barn is a building that is constructed on agricultural land for storage purposes, such as to store livestock and farming vehicles and other farming equipment. There are different types of barns, namely horse barns, pole barns, etc. Centuries ago, European farmers would seal the wood on their barns with an oil, often linseed oil, a tawny colored oil extracted from the seed of the flax plant. They would paint their barns with a linseed-oil mixture, often consisting of additions such as milk and lime. The combination produced a long-lasting paint that dried and hardened quickly. Now, where does the red come from?

In times, when the ready made paints were not available; they made their own red paint by mixing ferrous oxide to the traditional mix of ingredients that acts as a preservative; lime, linseed oil and milk to create their own version of red paint. That is how the color red was discovered for the olden barns. This red wasn't the bright red though, it had more of a burnt orange color because of the ferrous oxide, which is nothing but rust.

But white barns are the norm in Pennsylvania, central Maryland, and the Shenandoah Valley, and those in the Corn Belt states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa. The later states are directly in the path of early Pennsylvania/Maryland migration along the National Road (I-70 today).

White barns became popular with the beginning of commercial dairying (as contrasted with subsistence farming) that began with urbanization and the availability of rail transport after the Civil War. General belief is that white suggests the idea of cleanliness and purity—both good associations for milk. Maybe this was the period when farmers began to annually whitewash interior stable walls and it was a natural progression to transfer white to the exterior.

Although most barns have either red, white or weathered exteriors, other colors were used especially at "show farms" that raised horses or purebred livestock. The Hanover farms in Pennsylvania were yellow, green is found in the Virginia horse country, and black in Kentucky’s Bluegrass.

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March 31st, 2015

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