It's not news that the face of rural America has been undergoing great changes over the past couple of generations, but sometimes those changes take place slowly and almost imperceptibly, until one day it's like you awaken from a slumber and find your surroundings suddenly less familiar. Or perhaps you move away, and come back many years later to find that the pictures of place in your mind no longer bear close resemblance to the place as it now is. So it is with the old heritage barns throughout the Midwest and much of rural America. They are disappearing. Among the most iconographic of those old barns, for me at least, are the ones painted with Mail Pouch Tobacco advertisements: Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco. Treat Yourself To The Best
Perhaps you are entirely a creature of The Big City, urban to the core, and have never even driven through rural America. But anyone who lives in the Midwest or other regions where there is still significant farming is familiar with these barns. In many cases they were and are local landmarks of a sort, and as eye catching and evocative of place as a covered bridge or a lone, majestic 150 year old oak tree in the middle of a field.
From around 1890 until 1992 the Mail Pouch Chewing Tobacco company hired barn painters to fan out across rural America and strike various bargains with farmers in exchange for painting their barns with the company's advertisement. During the Sixties there were some 20,000 Mail Pouch barns. The most famous of those barn painters was a man from Belmont, Ohio, by the name of Harley Warrick. He was also the last of their barn painters when he passed away in 2000. Today there are perhaps a thousand of those barns left across the country.