David Jenkins, who set out in 1994 to find all of the messaged barns for his book “Rock City Barns: A Passing Era,” laments here that time has greatly reduced the number of barns that once formed a perfect outdoor marketing campaign. These then-and-now shots define the decline, with the exception of few barns that are well-maintained.
Once there were nearly 900 of them, scattered from Michigan to the Florida line, from the Carolina coast to Texas. Now fewer than 250 remain to lift their fading signs to the straying tourist, commanding him to “See Rock City.” They are the nostalgic old barns which have passed into American folk history as part of one of the most successful outdoor advertising campaigns of all time. And a surprising number of them were in the Blue Ridge mountains of western North Carolina and east Tennessee.
Entrepreneur Garnet Carter launched his tourist attraction on the escarpments of Lookout Mountain overlooking Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1932, but few tourists were attracted until around 1937, when he conceived the idea of painting a message on barns along what were then major thoroughfares leading to Chattanooga and sent out an enterprising, young sign painter named Clark Byers to make it happen.
By 1937, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park had been established, and the sleepy little villages of Gatlinburg in Tennessee and Maggie Valley in North Carolina were beginning to attract numbers of visitors from the Midwest and Northeast. It made perfect marketing sense to entice them to continue on to “See Rock City atop Lookout Mountain.”
In 1994, Bill Chapin, nephew of Garnet Carter and president of Rock City Gardens, commissioned me to find and photograph all the remaining Rock City Barns.
With 35-year-old, often sketchy records and occasional hearsay reports as my only sources of information, finding the sites was an endlessly fascinating piece of detective work, leading me 35,000 miles to more than 500 sites in 15 states.
Barns have burned, blown down, been bulldozed for highway construction or simply fallen from disuse and disrepair. To complicate things still further, highways have been changed, re-routed and re-named. Often, 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 19 south of here?”
“Oh, sure, knowed him well. He and my daddy used to go fishin’ 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 1985. It had got all rotten and falling down, y’know. Weren’t safe.”
I also learned to take information with a grain of salt. The people most familiar with an area are often the least observant. In Robbinsville, North Carolina I asked a gas station attendant about a barn. “Oh, sure,” he said, “it was just down the road here, ‘bout a half mile. But it’s been torn down.” Checking for myself, I found that 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 two sides!
What began as a job became a labor of love as I grew to treasure the dignity and individuality of each old structure. I learned to see beauty even in the isolation in which so many barns are ending their days. As a veteran photographer, I know most of the ways to help subjects look their best, but I soon learned that the barns wanted to be photographed simply and directly, without artifice. They seemed to say, “Here we are. This is the way we are. Please let us speak for ourselves.”
So here they are. I hope they will speak to you:
Want more? Check out this great Pinterest Board for extra images of Rock City Barns!
