Time for a Short Winter Break

                              A winter barnyard scene on U.S. 11W northeast of Knoxville, Tennessee.

The arctic weather is finally easing its grip on our campsite a few miles north of Knoxville. We have been able to keep warm in our RV, but our water has been frozen for days, which is inconvenient but unfortunately, not a new experience for me. I grew up in the southern Indiana hills in a house without running water, and in the great blizzard of March, 1993 our water was frozen for a week. 

However, the cumulative effects of the recent cold snap have left me feeling a little bummed out. 

Plus, I have a busy few days ahead.

Thursday we are driving to Atlanta for the wedding reception of grandson Nathan and his bride Hannah. We'll be back Saturday night. Then, on Monday, January 2, we have to move to a different site in this campground. So I'm going to take a little winter break. I'll be back Wednesday, January 4th.

If you enjoy my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia will be released in June, 2023. 

Photograph and text copyright 2022 David B.Jenkins.

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

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

The Origin of the Rock City Birdhouse

 Clark Byers and the first Rock City Birdhouse.

Clark Byers, the man who painted "See Rock City" on more than 800 barns over 30 years, most of them multiple times, was also the inventor of the distinctive red-and-black birdhouse which is now a principal advertising device for Rock City. Hundreds of thousands, probably millions of them, have been sold.

I went to interview Byers at his home in 1995 as I was working on the Rock City Barns book. A warm, soft-spoken man of deep Christian faith, Byers was quietly happy with the life he had lived.  In addition to his years of painting Rock City barns, he was the developer of Sequoyah Caverns, a tourist attraction in northeast Alabama, and at the age of 80 still ran a three hundred acre farm. For years the roof of his home on U.S. 11 in Rising Fawn, Georgia, just over the state line from Alabama, sported a "See Rock City" sign.

"I painted the first birdhouse that Rock City ever had," he told me. "It was my original idea -- I didn't copy nobody. I was gonna use it for a mailbox, but the Post Office wouldn't let us. It's still settin' in my garage."

Of course I wanted to see it, so he brought it out and placed it atop his mailbox. Naturally, I took a picture. And that's the story of how the Rock City birdhouse came to be. 

Rock City picked up on the idea and began making and selling the birdhouses. As far as I know, Clark never received a cent for his invention. 

Blog note: Sorry to have missed Friday's post. We are in a deep freeze here, with temperatures just above zero. We are keeping warm in our RV, but our water is frozen. All-in-all, we're doing okay. No thaw predicted until Tuesday.

If you enjoy my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia will be released in June, 2023. 

Photograph and text copyright 2022 David B.Jenkins.

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

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

A Few More Mail Pouch Barns

 

More Mail Pouch barns from my collection. I wish I could tell you where all these photos were made, but unfortunately I lost my travel notebook with most of my notes from 2000-2010.

 

If you enjoy my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia will be released in June, 2023. 

Photograph and text copyright 2022 David B.Jenkins.

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

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

More about Mail Pouch Tobacco Barns

                                          A well-preserved Mail Pouch barn in southeastern Ohio.

Mail Pouch Tobacco barns are not well-known in the South, but in the Midwest they were a pretty big thing. At its peak in the 1960s there were 20,000 barns bearing the Mail Pouch Tobacco sign in 22 states. 

The barns even have fan clubs. In 2003 I attended a meeting of a group known as the Mail Pouch Barn Association, which has, or at least did have, an annual get-together in barn painter Harley Warricks home town in Southeastern Ohio. Naturally, I photographed Mail Pouch barns coming and going, two of which are in this post. There's also a group called Mail Pouch Barnstormers, which has its own Facebook page.

I hoped at one time to do a book about Mail Pouch barns, similar to my Rock City Barns book, but couldn't find a publisher who was interested.

                          The southernmost Mail Pouch barn I've found was on U.S. 25 in southern Kentucky.

Both these photos were made in July, 2003 with a Canon 10D, my first digital camera.

If you enjoy my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia will be released in June, 2023. 

Photograph and text copyright 2022 David B.Jenkins.

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

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

 

The Other Great Barn Advertising Campaign

Mail Pouch Tobacco barn on U.S. 50 near Brownstown, Indiana

 Who first painted an advertising message on a barn? No one knows for sure, but it’s generally agreed that Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company of Wheeling, West Virginia, was first to mount an organized, large-scale, barn advertising program. They began painting “Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco” on barns around 1897, and hundreds of Mail Pouch barns still dot the Midwestern landscape. They are very common in Indiana, where I grew up, but I've never found one south of the Tennessee-Kentucky line.

The last of the Mail Pouch barn painters was a man named Harley Warrick, who began his career just after returning from service in World War II. He criss-crossed the Midwest for more than 40 years, painting and repainting the red, yellow, and black Mail Pouch signs as many as 20,000 times before finally hanging up his brushes in 1992,

The above photograph was made in the late 1990s on U.S. Highway 50 near Brownstown, Indiana, not far from my home town of Bedford. It was still in great condition, so it must have been one of the later ones Warrick painted. Although the paint he used seems to hold up really well -- in some cases it looks as if the paint is all that's holding many of the old barns together.

I made the photo with a Canon A2 camera. The film, as usual, was Fujichrome 100D. Can't remember what lens I used.

If you enjoy my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia will be released in June, 2023. 

Photograph and text copyright 2022 David B.Jenkins.

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

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

 

Connectivity (Again!)

 

This photo has nothing to do with today's subject, but will be relevant to

Friday's post. Canon 10D, September 10, 2003, Southern Indiana, I think.

 

 Getting consistent cell phone service and receiving internet data is an ongoing problem for those of us who live and travel in RVs. I missed posting on Monday because of  connectivity issues. 

As full-time RVers living in campgrounds in various places, we get our wifi through our cell phone companies and find it necessary to have two different ones in order to be sure of getting service wherever we go. We have a small "mifi" device from each company through which we receive data.

Unfortunately, for some reason my main computer will only receive wireless data from Consumer Cellular. It will not recognize T-Mobile's wifi. The 50 gigs of data per month we receive from CC is usually enough, but also unfortunately, Louise has been having quite a bit of back pain recently, so she's been spending more time than usual watching TV. Well, okay -- she's been bing-watching Hallmark Christmas movies! And more unfortunately still, she inadvertently had the TV set to stream on Consumer Cellular instead of T-Mobile (which has unlimited data). Consequently, she used up our 50 gigs of Consumer Cellular data in ten days and I could no longer use my computer online. 

After consulting with a long-time friend who is a professional computer expert and also calling T-Mobile support, I was no closer to getting my computer to recognize T-Mobile. I'm kinda slow, but eventually I remembered an old-tech solution: I pulled out an ethernet cable from my bottom desk drawer, connected my computer to the T-Mobile device with  it, and I'm back in business.

See previous posts about connectivity issues here and here.

If you enjoy my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia will be released in June, 2023. 

Photograph and text copyright 2022 David B.Jenkins.

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

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

The Gray House

The Gray House, all dressed up for Halloween.

 

(Adapted from my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia.)

John D. Gray, the English-born contractor who built the Western and Atlantic Railroad, including digging the tunnel at Tunnel Hill, liked the Northwest Georgia area so much that he bought 4,000 acres on Chickamauga Creek and laid out the town of Graysville in the late 1840s. 

Gray also built a mill dam on the creek, which still stands, and a large grist mill, which was burned during the Civil War. It was rebuilt in 1869 and operated into the 1950s.

In 1883, Dr. William T. Blackford, a Chattanooga physician, built a Queen Anne-style house and moved his practice to Graysville. In 1916 a member of the Gray family bought the house from Dr. Blackford's daughters. It has had numerous owners in the intervening years and was at one time a restaurant, The Graysville House.

The village of Graysville is just across the state line from Chattanooga and easy to get to. Just take East Brainerd Road, then Graysville Road into Georgia.

If you enjoy my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia will be released in June, 2023. 

Photograph and text copyright 2022 David B.Jenkins.

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

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

The Chief Vann House

                               The Chief Vann House at Spring Place, near Chatsworth, Georgia. 

(Adapted from my book Backroads and Byways of Georgia.)

The Chief Vann House is an elegant, two-and-a-half story, brick mansion built in 1804 by wealthy Cherokee Indian Chief James Vann, who also owned a hundred slaves and more than a thousand acres in what is now Murray County. In 1805, Vann opened his home to Moravian missionaries to hold one of the first Christmas celebrations in the Cherokee Nation. 

James Vann was murdered in 1809, and the property passed to his son Joseph, who, with other Cherokees, was forced out of the area in 1834. A bloody battle between claimants to the house ensued. The structure gradually deteriorated over the years until 1952, when it was purchased by a group of concerned citizens, given to the Georgia Historical Commission, and restored to its original grandeur. 

The Vann House features beautiful hand carvings, an unusual "floating" staircase, a 12-foot mantle, and fine antiques. The plantation also included 95 log outbuildings, none of which survives; however the Cherokee Farmstead Exhibit at the site is made up of original 1800s Cherokee outbuildings moved from other locations. 

The house and grounds are open for tours Thursday through Saturday, 9 a.m.–5 p.m. and Sunday 1 p.m.--5 p.m., with the last tour at 4:15 p.m. Admission is $6.50 for adults, $6 for seniors, and $5:50 for ages 6 to 17.

If you enjoy my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia will be released in June, 2023. 

Photograph and text copyright 2022 David B.Jenkins.

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

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

Old Clinton

  The Barron Blair House in Old Clinton was built in 1820.

 

One of the oldest settlements in central Georgia is Old Clinton, which was settled in the early 1800s. In 1820, when Captain John Mitchell built the home now known as the Barron Blair House, Clinton, which is a small community and historic district on the west side of Gray, in Jones County, was the fourth largest town in Georgia, with a population of 841. 

In November, 1864, Sherman's March to the Sea devastated Clinton. Today only 13 of the original buildings remain.

The 1809 McCarthy-Pope House is believed to be the oldest house in Old Clinton. 

 

The Clinton Methodist Church, built in 1821, is still in regular use.

If you enjoy my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, originally scheduled for December, will be released in June, 2023. 

Photographs and text copyright 2022 David B.Jenkins.

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

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

The Real People of McLemore Cove

Some older residents of McLemore Cove gather for the annual raffle of a hunting rifle.

For more than 30 years it was our privilege and pleasure to be members of the Cedar Grove Community Club. Membership was not formal; anyone who wished could be a member, attend meetings, and join in the club's community service efforts. We met on the third Saturday of every month (as best I remember) for a pitch-in dinner and discussion of whatever issues were currently within the club's purview. 

The biggest event of the year was the Wild Game dinner, which drew hundreds of people from around the area. The proceeds were used to buy Christmas gifts for poor children.

It's tempting to say that there aren't many people left like those we knew in the Cove, but I don't think that's true. I believe there are people like them all over this country -- solid, goodhearted, honest, hard-working people who love God, their families, their communities, and their country. These people are the real America. If enough of them were to wake up to the power they possess, America would soon be on a much different and very much better track.

The ladies of the Community Club serve hundreds at the annual Wild Game Dinner.

 

If you enjoy my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, originally scheduled for December, will be released in June, 2023. 

Photographs and text copyright 2022 David B.Jenkins.

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

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

The Rebirth of the Birdhouse Barn

 

The Birdhouse Barn in its original location beside Interstate 75 in Dalton, Georgia.

 

This post was adapted from my book Georgia: A Backroads Portrait.

Clark Byers was the man who went all around the country painting “See Rock City” signs on barns. He also invented the Rock City birdhouse, which he intended to use as a mailbox but the U.S. Postal Service wouldn’t let him.

Rock City picked up on the idea and began selling the birdhouses. 1n 1967, they asked Byers if he would paint the barn on the old Tibbs farm in Dalton, right beside I-75, to look like one of the birdhouses. So Clark painted it with the help of his oldest son Freddie. A year later he retired from painting barns. As far as I know this was the only one painted to resemble a birdhouse. At that time the barn could easily be seen from the highway. Later, trees grew up beside the road and made the barn difficult to see unless you knew where to look.

In 2001, as I was selling my book Rock City Barns: A Passing Era at the Prater’s Mill Country Fair near Dalton, a man stopped at my booth and talked with me for a few minutes. It turned out that he was the pastor of a congregation in Dalton, and that they had bought the Tibbs property. He said they hated to destroy the old barn, but they wanted to build a new church on the site.

I suggested that he call Bill Chapin at Rock City. To make a long story short, he did, and Rock City sent a crew to take the barn apart piece by piece. They moved it to a field at the foot of Lookout Mountain and put it all together again.

 For more than 80 years, people have looked at the barns and then gone up the mountain to “See Rock City.” Now you can go up the mountain to Rock City and look down to see a Rock City barn. 

Disassembling the barn in sections.

 

 Re-assembling the barn with many new components at the foot of Lookout Mountain.

 

An eagle's eye view of the Birdhouse Barn from Rock City.

If you enjoy my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, originally scheduled for December, will be released in June, 2023. 

Photograph and text copyright 2022 David B.Jenkins.

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

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

A Cross in the Sky

Chicago Skyline, 1989

Olympus OM2n, Zuiko 24mm f2.8, Fujichrome 100 film

(Click to enlarge)

 This is a re-post of a blog I wrote last year.

 A famous poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow begins:       

    "I shot an arrow into the air, It fell to earth, I know not where."

Longfellow was actually writing a metaphor about a song. But a photograph is like that. Like shooting an arrow into the air. We make our photographs, and if they're published who knows where they may be seen or whom they may influence, or in what way.

Throughout most of the 1980s one of my principal clients was an organization called the Christian Businessmen's Committee -- CBMC for short. Their mission was training and encouraging Christian businessmen to evangelize and train other businessmen to reach still more people for Christ.

In the late '80s they developed a strategy to concentrate their efforts on larger cities, and in 1989 and '90 I created seven audio-visual programs for them to advance this outreach. They sent me to cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to interview people and make photographs, not only of the people, but also background photos -- street scenes, buildings, landmarks, etc., in the various cities to make each AV program a complete story.

Walking the streets of downtown Chicago, I chanced to look up, liked the composition of the buildings and sky, and snapped a few photos with my faithful Olympus OM2n camera without a great deal of thought. I don't remember what lens was used, but probably the Zuiko 24mm f2.8. I never carried anything wider in those days.

The photo was used in one or more of the audio-visual programs, and later, on the cover of the CBMC annual report.

The CBMC headquarters are in Chattanooga, and from time to time they would bring in small groups of men from around the country for ministry training. One Sunday morning I was talking to some CBMC staff members at my church. They were there with a group of men who had come to town for training. I was introduced as the one who had created the audio-visuals, and one man shook my hand and said "I'm here because of your picture of the cross in the Chicago skyline. I saw that and said to myself 'Christ in the cities!' I want to be part of that!"

He left his job and went into full-time ministry with CBMC.

I've shot a lot of photos into the air in my career. It's nice to find out, once in a while, where one has landed.

If you enjoy my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, originally scheduled for December, will be released in June, 2023. 

Photograph and text copyright 2022 David B.Jenkins.

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

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

Count Your Blessings

 A good message for all seasons. Old Dial Road, Fannin County, Georgia. 11/5/2008

 Although I lived in northwest Georgia for more than forty years and loved the area, I also loved and found myself drawn to the mountains of north central and northeast Georgia as well. Over the years, that's where most of my day-long photo excursions took me.

A jaunt on November 5th, 2008 found me exploring the backroads of Fannin County. The fall had been mild, so the colors were still in full array. It was a good day for photography. I made several pictures that are in my online gallery, with more to come.

I have no idea who put this little scene together -- I don't remember seeing a church or school nearby -- but obviously someone wanted to honor the season and inspire passersby with the Thanksgiving message. So I'm glad to pass it along to you.

Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays. In many ways, in fact, I like it better than Christmas. Maybe it's the elderly curmudgeon in me, but I think Thanksgiving deserves to be celebrated and fully enjoyed for itself -- not swallowed up by the Christmas season, as is becoming increasingly the case. For that matter, even Halloween seems to be in danger of being swallowed up by Christmas! 

So let's enjoy our families and be grateful to God for all he has given us. Count your blessings.

(Photograph made with Canon 5D Classic digital camera and Canon 85mm f1.8 EF lens.)

If you enjoy my photographs, you can see more of them in my online gallery at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/  Looking is free, and, who knows? You might find something you want to keep.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, originally scheduled for December, will be released in June, 2023. 

Photograph and text copyright 2022 David B.Jenkins.

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

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

 

Finding My Voice

 

The Frank Inman House, Martin County, Indiana c.1972

I went to school with the Inman children in the 1950s. In the early 1960s,

Frank was killed in a hunting accident and the family moved away.

The house, a clapboard-over-logs structure, was never again occupied.

Rolleicord Vb Twin-Lens Reflex, Agfa film

 

Today's blog is a re-post of one I wrote on February 7th, 2020.

I began photographing in 1968 and for more than 25 years photographed anything and everything that I thought might make an interesting picture. My commercial work was moderately successful; my editorial and documentary work somewhat more so. But there was no organizing principle to my work because I did not know who I was as a photographer. I had not found my "voice."

One thing that always puzzled me was that I felt drawn to photograph old structures. In the early 1970s, on a trip to visit my parents in the sparsely settled hill country of southern Indiana, I spent a day driving around and photographing the homes of people I had known in my youth. Many were abandoned; some even falling down. I told my wife later that I didn't know why I was drawn to do that -- I certainly would never make a dime from it! 

Surprisingly, though, I eventually did. In 1994, I was commissioned by Rock City Gardens of Lookout Mountain, Georgia, to find and photograph every one of the still-standing barns that had been painted with the white on black "See Rock City" message. Using their barn-painting crew's old records from the 1960s, I drove more than 35,000 miles over an 18-month period, as I could steal time away from my studio, visited more than 500 sites in 15 states, and photographed the more than 250 barns still in existence.

Rock City Barns: A Passing Era was published in 1996 and became an instant best-seller. Sometime later I received a letter from the well-known art photographer Maria von Matteson, who proposed arranging a joint exhibit with her and the great Florida Everglades photographer Clyde Butcher.

The show never happened, but one thing that Maria said to me stuck: she said "You need to write an artist's statement that defines you." So I did, and this is what I came up with.

 

My domain is the old, the odd, and the ordinary; the beautiful, the abandoned, and the about to vanish away. I am a visual historian of an earlier America and a recorder of the interface between man and nature; a keeper of vanishing ways of life.

As a commercial, architectural, and occasional wedding photographer, I've done a lot of things that don't fit within that statement. Yet, for the past 24 years I've known who I am as a photographer and have sought to work as much as possible within that vein. How well I've succeeded will be for others to judge, but I know who I am and what I want to do for as long as I am able. 

 

Visit my online storefront at https://davejenkins.pixels.com/ to see a selection of my photographs for sale.

The second edition of my book, Backroads and Byways of Georgia, originally scheduled for December, will be released in June, 2023. 

Photograph and text copyright 2022 David B.Jenkins.

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

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