Why are barns painted red? Rust, skimmed milk and a Swedish copper mine
Drive through farm country in the American Midwest, Ontario or New England and the barns are red often enough that it looks like a rule. It started as a price. In 1922 the Sears, Roebuck catalogue sold red barn paint for $1.43 a gallon, while house paints in other colours started at $2.25. Farmers bought the cheap one, and they had been painting with cheap red for more than a century before that.
Barns started out unpainted
The first barns in North America were not red at all. Through the 1700s and into the early 1800s most were left as bare wood. The Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, which keeps a register of heritage barns, puts the change in the late 1700s, when farmers began looking for ways to protect the boards from rain and rot. Ontario Barn Preservation, a group that documents old barns in the province, links it to a change in how barns were built: after the middle of the 1800s farmers tightened their walls with horizontal clapboards, and clapboards needed paint to last.
Paint in the countryside was usually homemade. Farmers mixed their own from whatever was to hand, and the recipe that spread was simple: skimmed milk, lime and red iron oxide. According to the Washington heritage office, the mix hardened quickly into a plastic-like coating that lasted for years. Linseed oil, pressed from flax seed, was added later so the paint would soak into the wood instead of sitting on top of it.
Why the red came from rust
The colour came from the cheapest pigment available. Iron oxide is, in plain terms, rust, and red earth rich in it could be dug out of the ground in many places. Ontario Barn Preservation notes that by the 1920s such earth pigments were being mined in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Alabama, California, Iowa and Vermont. The best known of them, Venetian red, took its name from clays near Venice that gave the same colour. Old paint guides recommended it for “any common work, or for brickwork and outbuildings”, and it had two virtues a farmer cared about: it soaked into rough boards and it did not fade much in the sun.
Добавить в заметки чтобы посмотреть позже?
Two other reasons turn up in almost every account. Iron oxide is said to discourage the mould and moss that grow on damp wood, and a dark colour soaks up sunlight, which helps boards dry and keeps the building a little warmer in winter. The Washington heritage office also records a darker folk explanation, that some farmers tinted their paint with blood from slaughtered animals. It presents this as one of two theories rather than a documented practice, and the rust story is the one with the paint recipes behind it.
The Swedish version
Scandinavia got to red buildings first, and for a similar reason: a cheap red pigment was lying around in bulk. In Sweden it came from the copper mine at Falun. According to Falu Rödfärg, the company that still makes the paint, King Johan III ordered the roofs of his Stockholm palace painted red with “mine bran” from Falun in 1573. Nobles used red paint to make timber houses look like the brick buildings of continental Europe. The colour then moved down the social ladder, from estates to priests’ and officers’ houses, then to miners and farmers, and in the 1800s to barns and crofters’ cottages.
Industrial production of the paint began at the mine in 1764 and has not stopped since. The recipe is water, rye flour, linseed oil and the red tailings left over from the mine. Swedes still call it Falu red, and the red cottage with white trim became a national symbol in the late 1800s, helped along by the paintings of Carl Larsson.
Why some barns are white
Red was never the only choice, only the cheapest one. Once factories began making paint with chemical pigments in the middle and late 1800s, manufacturers sold special barn paints. The Washington heritage office puts it bluntly: red was the favourite until whitewash became cheaper, and then white barns began to go up. Money set the colour in both directions.
Habit kept the red long after the price stopped mattering. When Washington State surveyed its register of about 600 heritage barns, nearly half were either originally red or painted red at the time. Nobody needs to mix skimmed milk and rust in a bucket any more. Farmers buy red because a barn is supposed to be red, a rule that began with a pigment farmers could dig out of the ground.