An Endangered Species

Rock City Barn TN-6. U.S. 27, Rhea County, Tennessee

 I received a nice note from reader Mary Norman today. She said, "I’m so glad you created the Rock City Barns book. It has been on our coffee table for many years now. We rarely see any of the barns today. They really were a passing era. Thanks for preserving our southern history with your beautiful photographs and revealing texts. It is a true treasure."

As I wrote in Rock City Barns: A Passing Era, "You may not have noticed it, but barns are actually something of an endangered species these days. They don't build 'em like they used to, and one reason is the way farmers feed their livestock. The traditional barn was built with a large loft to store loose hay. The farmer went up there with a pitchfork and tossed hay down to his animals. Then square bales were invented, and that was okay, because they would also fit in the barn loft, and since they were tightly packed you could store even more hay. But if something happened to the barn there was not much reason to replace it, because hay can be stored more conveniently in an open, metal-roofed shed built at a fraction of the cost of a barn. 

And then, along came the big, round bales. No way you're going to get those 1000-pound babies in a loft. They have to be handled by a tractor with a front loader. So nobody much builds regular barns anymore, unless they have dairy cattle or horses. And the good old barns are falling down and not being replaced."

Case in point: I photographed the above barn on U.S. 27 in Rhea County, Tennessee in 1994. I was not yet officially working on the Rock City Barns book. When I passed by again in 1995, while working on the book, the barn was gone. Victim of the widening of the highway into a four-lane.

(The photo was made with a Canon EOS 10S. The lens was probably the Canon EF 28-105mm f3.5-4.5. The film, as always, was Fujichrome 100D.)

 

The second edition of Backroads and Byways of Georgia is almost ready to ship. Watch this space for ordering instructions.

Check out the pictures at my online gallery: https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and you might find something you like.

Photography and text copyright 2023 David B.Jenkins.

I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.

Soli Gloria Deo -- For the glory of God alone.