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.