Barn Yesterday 2
We used to see these all along the road when we would go visit my grandmother in South Carolina in the 50s and 60s.
Now they are going away.
Now the barns are vanishing from the landscape. Made obsolete by bulk-curing methods in the 1970s, many have fallen into disrepair. If you look closely, you can still see them by the roadside, being consumed by kudzu, sliding into a slow sideways collapse, or crushed under fallen trees.
“Catherine Bishir called them one of the most rapidly diminishing historic resources in the state,” says Benjamin Briggs, executive director of Preservation Greensboro . Bisher is a co-author of “A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Piedmont North Carolina.”
I treasure history. I trained as an historian. One of the afflictions which afflicts us, as afflictions are wont to do, is the cultural inability to the remember further back than last week. It allows con artists and flim-flam men to ply their trade.
Nevertheless, I question the belief of some that, just because something is old, falling down, and useless, it transforms ipso facto into an “historic resource.”
September 9, 2012 at 11:47 am
There were some in Pennsy around me. We actually had a Faulkner-esque barnburner, too. The mail pouch tobacco barns were often red, too. As long as there’s baseball I assume there will be chew, Red Man and Mail Pouch, the former being the most popular as I recall.
September 9, 2012 at 4:12 pm
I think it was Catfish Jim Hunter who chewed a mix of tobacco and Bazooka.