The Book that Changed My Life

Actually, the book that changed my life was the Bible. But the book that changed my professional life was Rock City Barns: A Passing Era.

In 1982 I began doing advertising and public relations photography for Rock City Gardens, a tourist attraction on Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga, Tennessee. In 1988, Bill Chapin, the president of See Rock City, Inc. told me about his long-time dream to create a book about Rock City's barns and asked me to find out what it would cost.

He decided not to proceed at that time, but my interest had been kindled. I obtained a list of the 110 barns they were still repainting, and whenever my travels brought me near one, I made a photograph of it if possible. In 1994, after learning that the number of barns being repainted had dwindled to 85, I made prints of some of my photos and told him I felt that if we were ever to do a book, now was the time.

He didn't say much. Just looked at the pictures for several minutes, asked a few questions, then said the magic words: "Let's do it!"

File Cards with Barn Locations

Cards like these were used by many businesses in pre-computer days.

In a few days he sent me a box containing hundreds of old office file cards from the 1960s; Rock City's only record of most barn locations. On each card was the name of the property owner at that time, the highway, and the distance from the nearest town. Many had a small photo attached, apparently taken about 1960; but some had only rough sketches of the barns. Inside the fold-over card was a record of rents paid (usually $3 to $5 per year) and repaint dates.  Rock City had had no contact with most of these barns since the late 60s.  The only way to find out if they were still standing was to go and see.

So I went.

Sorting the cards into piles by states (15), and within states by highways, I planned an itinerary and began photographing at Sweetwater, Tennessee on October 24, 1994.  Over the next 18 months, stealing time from my studio whenever I could, the trail of barns led my old Chevy Blazer nearly 35,000 miles to more than 500 sites.

When the photography was well along, I hired a designer and began writing the text. The designer found a printing agent and boom! I was in the publishing business! The agent placed our book project with a printing house in Belgium known for fine printing -- their principal business was museum catalogs.

Chapin ordered 20,000 copies for Rock City, which gave me a tidy profit on the enterprise. And this is where I made what I have come to regard as a serious mistake: instead of taking my profit and using it to finance other book projects, I reasoned that I could triple my money if I used it to order 10,000 books to sell myself.

Unfortunately, I had failed to consider the true costs. I had to hire additional staff to deal with taking orders and shipping; I had to rent additional office space; and I wound up spending a great deal of time over the next ten years promoting and selling the book: time that could have been used to build up my photography business and, as I said, to develope new book projects. Instead, I spent many weekends lugging my books and prints to arts and crafts shows and spent many hours traveling thousands of miles to book signings. 

As the old proverb says, "We grow too soon old and too late smart."

It was an interesting experience and kinda fun sometimes, but I do wish I had put the time into building up my business and developing new book projects.       
  

Blog Note: I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings at alifeinphotography.blogspot.com. I'm trying to build up my readership, so if you're reading this on Facebook and like what I write, would you please consider sharing my posts?

(Photographs copyright David B. Jenkins 2020)

Soli Gloria Deo

To the glory of God alone

Serendipity Is an Early Riser

Rock City Barn

U.S. Highway 165, Morehouse Parrish, Louisiana

Canon EOS-A2, 28-105 f3.5-4.5 Canon EF lens, Fujichrome 100 film.

One of my longest expeditions to make photographs for the Rock City Barns book was an eight-day slog under gray and dripping March skies to 30 locations scattered around Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi,and Texas. I found only six barns still standing. One of the most attractive was this small "mule barn" on U.S. Highway 165 in northeast Louisiana's Morehouse Parrish, which I first photographed under a leaden sky.

I knew there was a good picture here and I did my best to find it. The two pictures above are the best of the many variations I tried. But the light was poor and time was tight, so I pushed ahead on a two-day zig-zag across Mississippi which brought me empty-handed to nightfall at Greenville, 60 miles from the Louisiana barn. With the forecast still not looking good, I decided that if there were a visible sunrise, it would find me back at that barn. 

Blackberry vines, barn wood, and slanting sunlight.

The end papers of the Rock City Barns book.

 I really hate to get up early, so I was a little behind schedule. But not the sunrise, which beat me to the spot by ten minutes and radiantly blessed my efforts, including the close-up of sun-streaked blackberry leaves and weathered boards which grace the end papers of the Rock City Barns book. As I was making that photograph, I heard a rumble. I knew what was coming and dashed to get into position as it all came together -- barn, sky, and yellow locomotive.

Serendipity is an early riser. She loves to make good things happen, but you have to work on her schedule.

Blog Note: I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings at alifeinphotography.blogspot.com. I'm trying to build up my readership, so if you're reading this on Facebook and like what I write, would you please consider sharing my posts?

(Photographs copyright David B. Jenkins 2020)

Soli Gloria Deo

To the glory of God alone

A Fascination with Old Mills

Hamer Mill

Spring Mill State Park, Lawrence County, Indiana

I suppose my fascination with old mills began with the magnificent Hamer Mill at Spring Mill State Park, about twelve miles south of Bedford, Indiana, where I was born. Growing up in the area, Spring Mill was the default destination for Sunday School picnics, class outings, family reunions and the like. I’m told that I was taken to Spring Mill as a small child, but my first clear memory is of a school picnic there at the end of my third grade year at the one-room Tempy School in Martin County, which had about 25 students in grades one through six.

During my high school years there were many outings at Spring Mill, and years later when my six siblings were grown and there were enough Jenkins to have our own family reunion we assembled at Spring Mill every year, culminating with our parents’ 65th anniversary in 1999.

Dad died in 2000 and the reunions became more sporadic after that, but all but one were at Spring Mill. Always, every trip to the park included a pleasant walk from the picnic area to the old mill and the “pioneer settlement” that surrounded it; a village that consisted of many old houses, most of them built of logs, most original to the village, plus a few moved in from other locations.

Built of locally quarried limestone by the Bullitt brothers in 1817, the mill is three stories high and has walls three feet thick at the base. It replaced a much smaller log mill built in 1814. The 25-foot overshot wheel is fed by a flume carrying water from Hamer Cave.

Located in a deep valley in the southern Indiana hill country, the mill and its little village must have been an isolated place, but the mill and village flourished all through the mid-19th century. In 1896 the mill was abandoned until the 1920s when the state acquired the property, made it a state park, and began to restore the mill and the village. The original milling equipment is intact and still works. My wife buys a few pounds of corn meal every time we visit the park.
 

My interest in old structures lay dormant for many years, but returned in force when we moved from Miami to Chattanooga in 1970. We lived for 17 years within a mile or two of Gray's Mill at Graysville, Georgia, and I photographed it many times, as well as other old buildings. Graysville although tiny, has some interesting buildings. I'll write more about it sometime soon.

Warwoman Mill

Warwoman Creek, Rabun County, Georgia

At the other end of the spectrum from the majestic Hamer Mill is the tiny, long abandoned mill  on Warwoman Creek in Rabun County, Georgia. Its roof  is falling in and just a fragment of its wheel remains. But I love them both. They speak to me of history, of lives lived.

Blog Note: I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings at alifeinphotography.blogspot.com. I'm trying to build up my readership, so if you're reading this on Facebook and like what I write, would you please consider sharing my posts?

(Photographs copyright David B. Jenkins 2020)

Soli Gloria Deo

To the glory of God alone

On the Trail of the Elusive Rock City Barn

Rock City Barn, US. Highway 341, Glynn County, Georgia

Working with 35-year-old, often sketchy records and occasional hearsay reports as my only sources of information, finding Rock City barn sites was endlessly fascinating detective work.  Barns have burned, blown down, been bulldozed for highway construction and subdivisions, or simply fallen from disuse and disrepair, sagging silently into the soil. Many of the largest and finest barns are gone. To complicate things still further, highways have been changed, re-routed, and re-named. Sometimes the only way to locate a site was to find someone who remembered the property owner:

"Do you remember so-and-so, who had a place out on Highway 11 south of here?"

"Oh, yeah, knew him well. He and my daddy used to go fishing together all the time. Good ol' feller. He's dead now."

"Well, he had this barn on his farm, with a sign that said 'See Rock City.' Here's an old picture of it."

"Sure, I remember that ol' barn. Fact is, I helped him take it down, back around 1975. It had got all rotten and falling down, y'know. Wasn't safe."

I also learned to take the information I was given with a grain of salt.  The people most familiar with an area are often the least observant.  In Robbinsville, North Carolina on U.S. Highway 129 I asked a gas station attendant about a barn.  "Oh, sure," he said, "It was just down the road here, about a half mile.  But it's been torn down."  Checking for myself, I found his directions to the site were perfect.  But not only was the barn still standing, it had just been repainted and was one of the rare barns with "See Rock City" signs on both sides!

The barn pictured above took several hours to find. Searching along U.S. Highway 341 near Brunswick, Georgia, I went up and down the road numerous times. Someone had told me that the barn was "on the curve," but I couldn't find a curve. The road was straight. To compound the problem, a road crew was working on the highway and every time I went north or south I had to stop and wait for the flagman. Finally, I found someone who could tell me exactly where to look, which happened to be a small patch of woods about 50 yards from the roadwork. All I could see was a dense thicket. I parted the foliage with my hands and there it stood.

I later saw an old picture which showed that an earlier alignment of the highway ran almost to the front of the barn, then made a right-angle curve away. So that was "the curve."

 A lot can change in 35 or 40 years. But in compensation for the time lost looking for this barn, I got a photograph I really like at one of the places where I stopped to ask directions.

Manning Bros. General Merchandise, U.S. Highway 341, Glynn County, GA

(Photographs copyright David B. Jenkins 2020)

Soli Gloria Deo

To the glory of God alone

The Horse Laughed

Horse Laugh

I began photography for the Rock City Barns book on October 24th, 1994, going up U.S. Highway 11 to the Knoxville area, then up U.S. 27 into northeastern Kentucky. That was a three-day trip. The following week I was able to arrange my studio schedule to allow four days away. This time I went up through northeast Tennessee on U.S. 11. I was able to make many good pictures on this trip, because Highway 11 had for many years been a principle route from the northeastern states through the mid-South to Florida, and Rock City had painted their sign on a large number of barns, most of which were still standing.

The best, however, was reserved for last. The final stop on my way home was a barn on U.S. 11 near Riceville, Tennessee, about 50 miles from my studio in Chattanooga. The barn was located behind and to one side of the farmhouse, and as I pulled into the drive it appeared that no one was home.

I immediately noticed that an old truck, long since abandoned to rust away in front of the barn, would be an excellent foreground element to frame the building and add depth to the composition. Using a Canon EOS 10s camera loaded with Fujichrome RDP100 (slide) film and a Canon 24mm f2.8 EF lens, I was positioning myself for the shot when up pranced a friendly horse, or maybe a large pony, just on the other side of the fence from me and smack-dab in the middle of my picture!

I decided to walk along the fence to see if the horse would follow me out of the picture. He did, but when I ran back to my chosen position he pranced along with me. I tried this maneuver two or three times, and the pony thought it was great fun. Finally, I thought “What the heck! I’ll just shoot it from here!” As I raised my camera the horse threw back his head and gave me the horse laugh!

Serendipity, which had been waiting for me all along, smiled and gave me the best photograph in the book and one that I consider one of my all-time best.

(Photograph copyright David B. Jenkins 2020)

Soli Gloria Deo

To the glory of God alone

A New (to Me) Old Mill

The Crosseyed Cricket Mill

Roane County, Tennessee. c. 1850

As I mentioned in my previous post, this past weekend featured a big family gathering at the home of my son Don in Knoxville, Tennessee to celebrate the graduation of his son, Devlin, from high school. To relieve the congestion of aunts, uncles, and cousins from as far away as Indiana stuffing every nook and cranny of Don’s and Kim’s spacious home, Louise and I hooked our little travel trailer to our truck and made arrangements (actually, we made the arrangements well in advance) to camp at the TVA campground at Melton Hill Dam on the Clinch River just west of Knoxville. The campground is in a very lovely setting, but campers are limited to three-week stays.

Since one of the things we hope to do after our house is sold is buy a larger trailer or a motor home, with a view to being able to spend several weeks or even months at selected locations (such as Florida in the winter and Knoxville in the spring), we decided to go looking for a campground suitable for an extended stay in the Knoxville area.

On U.S. Highway 321 just outside the Melton Hill TVA area, we noticed a sign on a side road advertising “The Crosseyed Cricket Campground.” It was only four miles, so off we went for a look. The office was closed and we couldn’t find anyone to talk to, but we drove around the property enough to see that it would be a pleasant place for an extended stay, and reasonably close to our Knoxville family.

Near the entrance to the campground, I noticed a very old, weathered, two-story, clapboard building, but did not give it my full attention because I was looking for the campground office. But as we were leaving, Louise said, “David, that’s an old mill!” And so it was. As those who have read much of this blog will know, that's the kind of thing I'm always looking for. As I wrote in the introduction to my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia, I'm drawn to the old, the historic, the quirky and offbeat, the strange and unusual, and the beautiful. Old houses, old churches, old courthouses, old mills, covered bridges and historic sites. 

The building on the right was once a restaurant.

I found a place to park and naturally, made some photographs. From an elderly gentleman in a nearby house, I learned that the mill is actually on the campground property and is maintained by the owners. From one of the old mill web sites that I have bookmarked I learned that the mill is the Crosseyed Cricket Mill, built on Cheney Creek around 1850. It’s on Paw Paw Plains Road in Roane County, Tennessee.

The overshot wheel is in good shape and

has apparently been recently repaired.

The day was heavily overcast, which is usually better for photographing such scenes because it reduces the contrast and avoids the dark shadows and washed out highlights of sunny days. The camera was my lovely Fuji X-H1 with the surprisingly sharp 16-50mm f3.5-5.6 lens. ISO was set to 3200 because of the overcast and because the X-H1 handles such speeds effortlessly.

(Photographs copyright David B. Jenkins 2020)

Soli Gloria Deo

To the glory of God alone

Repost: My All-Time Best Photograph

BlogNote: I probably have a few readers who, no matter at which point they began reading this blog, have gone back and read every post from the beginning. Most probably have not, so just for fun (and because I'm in the midst of a big family gathering to celebrate my youngest grandson's graduation from high school)  I'm repeating that first post from August, 2011.

More than any other photograph I’ve ever made, this represents what photography, for me, is all about – beauty and mystery.

The year was 1989 and I was at the mission hospital at Abak, Ibom Province, Nigeria, on assignment for Church of God World Missions. Evening chapel service had just ended as the setting sun, its beams parallel to the ground, threw a splash of flame against the chapel wall.

I seldom used auto-exposure back then, but there was no time to do anything except raise my Olympus OM2n and click off three quick shots with the lens that was on it – a Tamron 100-300 f4 zoom at the 300mm setting. I noticed that the exposure on Fujichrome RD100 slide film was 1/15^th second at f4, so I had little hope of getting anything usable. No chimping in those days!

Back in the US, when the film was processed I was pleased to find that I had one very sharp exposure and another that was usable. This is the best one.

(Photograph copyright David B. Jenkins 2020)

Soli Gloria Deo

To the glory of God alone

Family Portraits

Do you make portraits of your family? I've been making casual and semi-casual portraits of mine for more than 50 years, and some of these photos are among my most prized possessions. Here are a few of them. Above is my wife Louise, at age 26. A print of this has graced my nightstand for many years. Following in order are: 

My father, Byrl T. Jenkins on his 90th birthday.

My mother, Louise Goodman Jenkins

My brother Steve.

My son Don (we called him Donny in those

days) playing in spray from a sprinkler.

A dignified PR portrait for my son Rob, the writer.

Louise and Harley.

Louise and Donnie at a campground pool, 1972

Keep a camera handy and don't miss out on opportunities to make portraits of your family. They will be precious to you and to them in years to come.

(Photographs copyright David B. Jenkins 2020)

Soli Gloria Deo

To the glory of God alone