A barn advertisement is an outdoor advertisement

Out-of-home advertising

Out-of-home advertising is made up of more than 100 different formats, totaling $6.99 billion in annual revenues in 2008 in the USA. Outdoor advertising is essentially any type of advertising that reaches the consumer while he or she is outside the home...

 painted onto the exterior of a roadside barn

Barn

A barn is an agricultural building used for storage and as a covered workplace. It may sometimes be used to house livestock or to store farming vehicles and equipment...

. Barn advertisers take advantage of the barns' prominence in rural landscapes, paying their owners for the right to paint and maintain logos and slogans on them. Once a common form of billboard

Billboard

Billboard is a weekly American magazine devoted to the music industry, and is one of the oldest trade magazines in the world. It maintains several internationally recognized music charts that track the most popular songs and albums in various categories on a weekly basis...

 advertising in the Midwest

Midwestern United States

The Midwestern United States is one of the four U.S. geographic regions defined by the United States Census Bureau, providing an official definition of the American Midwest....

ern and Southeastern United States

Southeastern United States

The Southeastern United States, colloquially referred to as the Southeast, is the eastern portion of the Southern United States. It is one of the most populous regions in the United States of America....

 during the early– to mid–20th century, barn advertisements have faded into obscurity, as many original examples – along with the structures that display them – fall into disrepair.

Advertisers

Common barn advertisers include local roadside attraction

Roadside attraction

A roadside attraction is a feature along the side of a road, that is frequently advertised with billboards to attract tourists. In general, these are places one might stop on the way to somewhere else, rather than being a final or primary destination in and of themselves. The modern...

s, restaurants, and chewing tobacco

Chewing tobacco

Chewing tobacco Chewing tobacco Chewing tobacco (also known colloquially as hoobastank, backy, tobac, doogooos,Hogleg, chewpoos, chits, chewsky, chawsky, dip, flab, chowers, guy, or a wad, as well as referred to as dipsky, snuff, a pinch, a yopper, a Packing a bomb, a tobbackey or packing a...

 manufacturers.

The Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company

Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company

The Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company of Wheeling, West Virginia, are best known for their Mail Pouch Tobacco. Mail Pouch was a popular chew advertised on thousands of barns, most of which were located in the rural Ohio Valley. Each barn had an end or side painted with the tobacco logo...

 is credited with popularizing the medium. The company began advertising their products on the sides of buildings in 1890. By 1925, they had moved to advertising on Mail Pouch Barn

Mail Pouch Tobacco Barn

A Mail Pouch Tobacco Barn, or simply Mail Pouch Barn, is a barn with one or more sides painted from 1890 to 1992 with a barn advertisement for the West Virginia Mail Pouch chewing tobacco company , based in Wheeling, West Virginia...

s. At the program's height in the early 1960s, some 20,000 barns in 22 states displayed Mail Pouch advertising, with the greatest number in Ohio

Ohio

Ohio is a Midwestern state in the United States. The 34th largest state by area in the U.S.,it is the 7th‑most populous with over 11.5 million residents, containing several major American cities and seven metropolitan areas with populations of 500,000 or more.The state's capital is Columbus...

. Most of the barns were painted by Harley Warrick. Competitors such as Red Man

Red Man

Red Man is a leading brand of chewing tobacco in the United States, produced since 1904. Red Man has traditionally come as leaf tobacco, in contrast to twist chewing tobacco or the ground tobacco used in snuff, and became a leader in that form of oral/dental/mouth tobacco. It is made by the...

 and Hillside Tobacco also painted barns in smaller numbers.

In the early 1940s, Clark Byers

Clark Byers

Clark Byers was an American sign maker. He is famous for painting over 900 barns in 19 states with the slogan "See Rock City"....

 painted barns and their roofs for Rock City

Rock City

Rock City is a roadside attraction near Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Lookout Mountain in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, located near Ruby Falls. It is well-known for the many barn advertisements throughout the Southeast and Midwest United States that have the slogan "See Rock City" painted on barn roofs...

 near Chattanooga, Tennessee

Chattanooga, Tennessee

Chattanooga is the fourth-largest city in the US state of Tennessee , with a population of 169,887. It is the seat of Hamilton County...

, often with messages promising travelers the chance to see seven states from atop Lookout Mountain

Lookout Mountain

thumb|right|See seven statesLookout Mountain is located at the northwest corner of the U.S. state of Georgia, the northeast corner of Alabama, and along the southern border of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Lookout Mountain, along with Sand Mountain to the northwest, makes up a large portion of the...

. Over 900 barn roofs in 19 states were painted to advertise the attraction.

More recently, Bob Evans Restaurants

Bob Evans Restaurants

Bob Evans Farms, Inc. is a food service, processing, and retail company based in Columbus, Ohio. The company is named after its founder, Bob Evans . It operates two family dining restaurant chains in the United States, Bob Evans Restaurants and Mimi's Cafe...

 painted barns in Indiana

Indiana

Indiana is a US state, admitted to the United States as the 19th on December 11, 1816. It is located in the Midwestern United States and Great Lakes Region. With 6,483,802 residents, the state is ranked 15th in population and 16th in population density. Indiana is ranked 38th in land area and is...

 and Illinois

Illinois

Illinois is the fifth-most populous state of the United States of America, and is often noted for being a microcosm of the entire country. With Chicago in the northeast, small industrial cities and great agricultural productivity in central and northern Illinois, and natural resources like coal,...

 in a style identical to their billboards, until 2001. The restaurant chain later painted some barns with the Italian tricolor

Flag of Italy

The flag of Italy is a tricolour featuring three equally sized vertical pales of green, white, and red, with the green at the hoist side...

 to advertise its pasta dishes. Frisch's Big Boy

Frisch's

Frisch's Big Boy is a regional restaurant chain from the Big Boy franchise. Today there are over ninety restaurants in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. Frisch's also owns numerous Golden Corral restaurants in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia...

 also advertised on barns at one point.

From 1997 to 2002, the Ohio Bicentennial Committee commissioned Scott Hagan to paint 101 barns, including one in each county, with the committee's logo and colors. All but one remain standing. The painted barns celebrated the state's 200th anniversary in 2003.

Regulation

In 1965, Congress passed the Highway Beautification Act

Highway Beautification Act

In the United States, highway beautification is the subject of the Highway Beautification Act, passed in the Senate on September 16, 1965 and in the U.S. House of Representatives on October 8, 1965, and signed by the President on October 22, 1965...

, which regulated and in some cases removed billboards from the sides of federally-funded highways. Barns advertisements were also affected by this legislation, leading owners to paint over them, until public outcry led to a 1974 amendment that specifically exempted them as "folk heritage barns". The National Historic Barn Preservation Act of 2001 protects barns 50 years or older from demolition and funds education programs about these structures.