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Here’s a question from reader Ryan: “Why are barns painted red?”
Beginning with the earliest American settlements and continuing into the 18th century, most barns weren’t painted at all. Early American barn builders took sun exposure, temperature, moisture, wind, and water drainage patterns into account when placing and building barns and seasoned the wood (that is, they reduced the moisture content) accordingly. The right type of wood in the right environment held up fine without any paint.
Towards the end of the 18th century, these old school methods of barn planning and building fell by the wayside. People sought a quicker, easier fix for preserving their barns—a way to coat and seal the wood to protect it from sunlight and moisture damage. Farmers began making their own coating from a mix of linseed oil (a tawny oil derived from the flax seeds), milk and lime. It dried quickly and lasted a long time, but it didn’t really protect the wood from mold and wasn’t quite like the “barn red” we know today (more of a burnt-orange, really).
Turning Red
The problem with mold is that it traps moisture in the wood and speeds up decay is that it decays wood (and, in large quantities, can pose health risks to people and animals). Rust, it turns out, kills mold and other types of fungi, so farmers began adding ferrous oxide (rusted iron) to the linseed oil mix. A little bit of rust went a long way in protecting the wood, and gave the barn a nice red hue.
By the late 19th century, mass-produced paints made with chemical pigments became available to most people. Red was the least expensive color, so it remained the most popular for use on barns, except for a brief period when whitewash became cheaper and white barns started popping up. (White barns were also common on dairy farms in some parts of Pennsylvania, central Maryland and the Shenandoah Valley, possibly because of the color’s association with cleanliness and purity.)
Throughout Appalachia (a historically poorer region), many barns went unpainted for lack of money. In the tobacco regions of Kentucky and North Carolina, black and brown barns were the norm, since the dark colors helped heat the barn and cure tobacco.
Today, many barns are still painted the color traditionally used in a given region, with red still dominating the Northeast and Midwest.
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Comments (11)
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In the midwest, I always heard the story that barns were red because the “paint” was made from cow’s blood & milk. Is that just an old farmer’s tale?
posted by Benno von Archimbaldi on 11-16-2009 at 3:11 pm
Interesting. I always thought it was because a red barn would be easier to see from the fields.
posted by Jo on 11-16-2009 at 3:34 pm
Barns are painted red because if it is not red then it is not a barn.
posted by Witty Nickname on 11-16-2009 at 4:14 pm
I grew up in a small farming town in the mid-west and we had some all brick barns. I asked my Dad one time why some barns are wood and others are brick. He told me that a brick barn was used as brewery for the local farmers. I don’t know if this is true or not but I’ve always liked the look of brick barns.
posted by Chris on 11-16-2009 at 4:22 pm
I heard that red was the cheapest color because it was sold more than other colors, in large part due to painting the large surface area of barns. Sort of a self-fulfilling profit-cy (sorry, couldn’t resist the pun.
posted by Jonny on 11-16-2009 at 4:28 pm
“The problem with mold is that it traps moisture in the wood and speeds up decay”
Actually, the mold IS the agent of decay. The problem isn’t that it traps water; the problem is that some species of mold digest cellulose or other complex carbohydrates, which is what breaks down the wood. The water is necessary for the mold’s growth.
posted by WW on 11-16-2009 at 6:50 pm
Natural wood barns are the normal for Connecticut’s Tobacco farms.
posted by Tim on 11-16-2009 at 9:31 pm
I could be wrong, but isn’t the logic of Jonny’s argument wrong? If it was the cheapest, it would imply that the supply exceeded demand so the price was discounted. If more people demanded red to pain their barns, then the price would go up accordingly and people would paint their barns whatever color was the new, cheapest color.
Unless Jonny is trying to argue economies of scale from large-batch production of red paint. Or is it MY logic that is off? (Distinct possibility.)
posted by Julie on 11-16-2009 at 11:00 pm
We have an old tradition of painting barns and other simpler buildings red here in Sweden as well.
Historically there is a very definitive reason for this. As the article said, iron oxide protects wood very well and this was readily available byproduct of the very rich iron mines around the city of Falun in northern Sweden (the paint is still called Falu-red for this reason). This is also the reason for the typical swedish cottages, red houses with white corners and windows.
A personal tangent; I grew up in a house from the late 18th century and one of the few things that shows that it used to be a fairly luxurious house is that it is painted green (which was a very expensive paint).
(recaptcha: Bonaparte catered – our royal line beginning around the same time as our old house.)
posted by kojjan on 11-17-2009 at 8:57 am
Very cool to see shenandoah listed, I’m from there. It’s true, there are quite a few white barns around.
posted by Mammoth Jay on 11-17-2009 at 9:23 am
Very cool story! I knew most of the history, but did NOT know about the linseed oil, or that the ferrous oxide acted as a fungicide…
In the old days, there wasn’t much book learning, and there wasn’t an internet. So folks lived by common sense. That meant if something was cheap (or free!) and it did the job, then that’s what was used.
So what, right? Well in the old days, cotton cost too much to clean by hand and then spin into thread. Flax was much easier… Cut the stalks, smack the seeds into a basket, soak the stalks for a week, and you had the raw fibers to make linen. The longer you soaked the stalks, the darker the linen got, so you could even ‘dye’ the linen without spending any money!
The seeds were a by-product of making the fabric for their cloths. So the linseed oil was free. When the oil was crushed out, the seeds could be fed to the livestock.
In the old days, before refrigeration was available, most farmers had plenty of milk available. Combining the milk with the linseed oil created a protein-based glaze on wood that was weather-resistant. \Milk paint\ was the common paint most folks used since they could make it themselves. \Oil paint\ was made with linseed oil and other additives – and it cost money.
And the ferrous oxide could be found almost anywhere… Walk along a stream and look for red mud – that’s ferrous oxide leaching out of the soil!
So the oil, milk, and ferrous oxide were free… Not a bad deal considering most of these barns when cared for, lasted over 100 years!
\Red Barns\ was an awesome article – thanks!!
posted by Greg on 11-17-2009 at 11:10 am