Why are barns painted red? or sometimes white? or green?

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Pullman Farm, Williamston

Driving home from the garden center on back roads the day before Mother's Day, sharing my tiny car space with a huge hanging basket of yellow and orange flowers for my mother-in-law, I must have taken a different turn than I have in the past.

Oh I love drifting along country roads. I'm happy to drive the same route to work and back every day. I get to watch farmers plant seed in black fields, then green rooster tails of corn rise in slow release, and windswept currents ripple through seas of bronze wheat. Horses bow their long noses as I pass. Honking geese fly in front of my windshield. Rainbows arc, sometimes in doubles. But the best country driving is on a Saturday with no destination, turning right or left where I haven't before. Like on the day before Mother's Day when I turned the Aveo onto Meech Road and drove past this white farm only to stop the car, turn around, go back, and take it in.

I was struck with the farm's simple cleanness. Even the sky was white. And then I wondered why they painted their barns white (or didn't paint, as the case might be).

The photo isn't crooked, the barn is.

Most Michigan barns are red, like the ones in the photo below in Six Lakes, which are "barn red" and also faded. The barns in the photos below those are painted Marilyn Monroe lipstick red. They're also newer.

true "barn red" barns in Six Lakes

Marilyn Monroe lipstick red barns. This is not an official barn color name, by the way.

Ok they're not exactly the same shade of red. Maybe her lips are somewhere between the old barns and new ones.

So I did a little surfing and found some barn color history.

until the early 1700s barns in Europe and North America weren't painted but were treated with linseed oil
American barns got bigger than European ones - all those big hopes for big crops on big land, and preservation became more important
some farmer discovered he could mix skimmed milk, lime, and red ferrous oxide (plentiful farm rust) for a durable coating (later on they added linseed oil)
wealthier farmers even used the blood of slaughtered farm animals to color their "paint"; Native Americans had been using turkey blood added to egg whites and clay for red pigments (yeah, they called it "Indian Red")
milk paint (otherwise known as whitewash) - milk, lime and pigment - goes back to earliest cave paintings and King Tut's tomb and didn't diminish until paint was mass produced in the 1800s
1868 was the year the first metal paint can was patented, the kind with the tight-fitting lid you have to open with a screwdriver
so why white? some think white barns started with dairy farms in Pennsylvania and Ohio to give that clean sanitary feel: white barns = white, pure milk; like I said when I saw the Meech Road farm, it felt clean

I'm afraid I have no answer to the question Why is your barn green? I'm guessing it has something to do with the reason farmers do a lot of things they do: there was a special on green paint and it was very cheap.

our green barn and outbuildings shot in 2007;
we "bought the farm" in November 2003;
have you heard the idiom "bought the farm"?
phrases.org says it means
"To die, particularly in an accident or military action.
the origin might be:

. . . the idea that when a plane crashed on a farm the farmer may sue the government for compensation. That would generate a large enough amount of money to pay off the farm's mortgage. Hence, the pilot paid for the farm with his life."

I don't know what year the barns on this property were painted green. We inherited this old aerial photo of the place with an inscription on the back that in 1957 it was the property of one Joe Hutchison, and the barns and house were white. (Glad this pilot didn't "buy the farm" so we could have this old photo.)

this shot was taken the year after I was born, but I didn't live here then;
I lived about 40 minutes drive from here, toddling around my house in town)

closeup of our farm in 1957

Sadly, barns like ours - built about 100 years ago - are deteriorating, and it takes a lot of moolah and hard work to repair and maintain them. Many have fallen flat. I hate to see barns sided with metal or vinyl - I don't want to lose the open space between boards that allows light and wind through for one thing - but using more durable siding than wood is often the solution to keeping them alive. Don has done some work - with our nephew Paul - to support the once sagging corner of our barn. It will take a lot more to restore it. We'd like to find a barn preservation grant, but even if we do find a way to fund our big green barn's restoration, we'll respect its old bones.