Blog Note: I've been working on a post about my 1992 trip to Asia and got my days mixed up. I still have a half-dozen slides to scan before I can post that story. So I'm repeating a post from November, 2020. The Asia trip will post next week.
When working on the book Rock City Barns: A Passing Era, a box of age-yellowed file cards was my guidebook to finding the old barns with "See Rock City" signs. The very cards that once were used by Clark Byers and his crew of barn painters themselves.
When I began the project I assumed that all the barn locations were included on the cards and that there were no others. However, as I traveled around the southeast and midwest on my search, I found about 20 barns for which there were no file cards. They had been lost from Rock City's records. I called them "lost barns."
My usual way of traveling to a barn location was that if there was an interstate that paralleled the old highway where the barn was (presumably) located, I would drive the interstate to save time, get off at the nearest exit, photograph the barn if it was still there, and get back on the interstate.
After my Rock City Barns book was published in 1996, I began to receive postcards and letters about other lost barns. I tracked them down and photographed them as I had opportunity.
One afternoon as I was driving down Interstate 24 on
my way home from Nashville,
it occurred to me that there were stretches of highway that I might have
overlooked because of getting on and off the interstate instead of driving the
old roads to see what might be there. I immediately got off I-24 south of Murfreesboro, went over to
U.S. Highway 41, which paralleled the interstate, and headed south. I found the
first unlisted barn in less than a mile. And not only that -- it was one of the
very rare barns with the message "T'would be a Pity to Miss Rock City."
And then I found another one a half-mile or so south of that, both on the left side of 41.
If I had been watching carefully I would have found a
third barn just another half-mile south, but on the right side of the road. As
it was, I didn't learn of it until years later, when Brent Moore, who has
interesting blogs at http://seemidtn.blogspot.com/ (See Middle Tennessee), and http://see-rock-city.blogspot.com/
(See Rock City),
told me about it. I photographed it in 2014 and again in 2019. As you can see, it
deteriorated considerably in five years.
The first two photos were made with a Canon EOS A2 with the 28-105mm f3.5-4.5 EF lens and Fujichrome RDP100 film. For the third one, I used a Canon EOS 6D digital camera, probably with the EF 24-85mm lens; and for the bottom photo, a Fuji X-T20 with the Fujinon XC 16-50mm lens.
Visit my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/
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Photography and text copyright 1999-2025 David B.Jenkins.
I post Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless life gets in the way.
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