Interstate 59 shot past our windows like a streak of pigeon excrement on a commercial airline windshield. We crossed into Tennessee, heading northward to New Jersey. The radio played Jerry Reed. And I was busy counting barns.
A barn in the distance. Overgrown with fairytale weeds. Freshly painted. Its rooftop, all-black, with bold white letters, reading: “See Rock City.”
And I felt a warm smile playing at the corners of my mouth.
“See Rock City,” we all said in soft voices.
The American interstate is a mind-numbingly ugly affair. Wholly unlovely in every way. There is no charm on an interstate. No romance. No beauty. You will pass few shotgun homes, no quaint water towers, no Rockwellian town squares made of brick and glass.
No. On an interstate, you exist in an artistic hell, entirely conceptualized and maintained by your captors at the Federal Highway Administration Department. Huge culverts, hideous overpasses with all the charm of Soviet bunkers. Concrete, concrete, and more concrete. It ain’t pretty.
Unless you’re talking about the barns.
I collect old barns. I carry them with me. A good barn is hard to find. Most are falling apart. Their wood, unpainted and gray with age. Rusted rooftops, vanishing into corrosion.
Barns are getting harder to find. American barns are disappearing at an alarming rate. At one time, this nation had an estimated 6.8 million barns. Today there are 650,000.
But if you keep your eyes open, you’ll still see them.
The humble American barn comes in many different styles. You have gable barns, broken gables, Dutch gambrels, English gambrels, hip roofs, gable-on-hips, roundtops, gothics, cylinders, monitor barns, bank barns, pole barns, kit barns, centric barns, and the ever-present salt-box shed your grandfather probably had.
Some are well-maintained, still in use, standing erect, freshly painted. Some have succumbed to slow deaths, God rest their souls.
But Rock City barns are a collector’s item.
It all started in the 1930s. Clark Byers, born in Flat Rock, Alabama, was a buttermilk bottler who earned $3 per week. Clark eventually got tired of buttermilk and became a sign painter instead. The pay was garbage, but he enjoyed the time outdoors.
One day, the owner of Rock City—a new 10-acre tourist attraction atop Lookout Mountain—contacted Clark. The man on the phone hired Clark to paint as many barns as he could.
That was all the motivation Clark needed. He climbed into his Chevy pickup, weighted down with five-gallon drums of oil-based paint. He criss-crossed the rural two-lane highways looking for barns.
It was a simple marketing scheme. Clark would hit up local farmers, offering to paint their barns for free. In exchange, he would paint an advertisement on the rooftop. White letters. Three simple words. “See Rock City.” Genius.
Namely, because in those days, there WERE no billboards, save for your random Burma Shave highway signs:
“At ease,” she said,
“Maneuvers begin,
“When you get those whiskers,
“Off your chin.”
Burma-Shave.
But Clark changed the highway-ad landscape. Literally. For three decades, he burned up the byways, painting roadside barns.
He spanned 19 states in his old truck, running as far north as Michigan, as far west as Texas, reaching southward into Florida. He single-handedly painted over 900 barns.
Today, there are 75 Rock City barns left. States such as Tennessee, West Virginia, and Ohio have taken measures to protect his work as historic landmarks. Of all the surviving barns, Tennessee has the most.
And you can still see them from the interstate. But you have to keep your eyes open, your attention ready, and your hands off your phone.
Which is getting increasingly harder for Americans to do.