black-lighted dioramas of nursery-rhyme scenes. This is family entertainment born before Disney World and MTV, and it still has the power to fascinate children—and their parents.

I traced Byers’s steps nearly 60 years later. My initial motivation was much the same as his: purely commercial. I’ve always been attracted to old barns and abandoned houses, but it was Rock City’s participation that made my project possible. Bill Chapin, the president of See Rock City, Inc., had a long-time dream of a book of his signature barns, and he was willing to put up the money to photograph them. Guided by an old set of file cards, Rock City’s only record of barn locations, I drove thirty-five thousand miles during an eighteen-month period, searching out more than five hundred sites in fifteen states and discovering about 250 barns still standing in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. Byers says there were barns in nineteen states at one time, but he’s a little hazy about just which states they were. Michigan once had a number of Rock City barns, and I’ve heard reports of barns in Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, as well, though I’ve never seen them.

With those thirty-five-year-old, often sketchy records and the occasional hearsay report as my only sources of information, finding the sites was an intriguing piece of detective work. Barns have burned, blown down, been bulldozed for highway construction and subdivisions, or simply collapsed from disuse and disrepair. To complicate things, highways have been changed, rerouted, and renamed.

Often the only way to find a site was to find someone who had known the property owner.

“Do you remember Bill Jones, who had a place out on Highway Eleven south of here?”

“Oh, yeah, knew him well. He and my daddy used to go fishing together. Good ol’ feller. He’s dead now.”

“Well, he had this barn on his farm, with a sign that said ‘See Rock City.’ Here’s an old picture of it.”

“Sure, I remember that barn. Fact is, I helped him take it down, back around 1975. It had got all rotten, y’know. Wasn’t safe.”

I also learned to take information with a grain of salt. The people most familiar with an area can be the least observant. In Robbinsville, North Carolina, a gas station attendant told me, “It used to be right down the road here, ‘bout half a mile. They tore it down last year.” His directions were perfect. However, not only was the barn still standing, but it had just been repainted and was one of those rare barns with “See Rock City” signs on both sides!

Along the way, I found 19 barns that were not in Rock City’s records. A few of them were located through leads from local

residents; others I discovered while traveling to known sites. Still more must exist, and I hope someday to find them. It was always exciting to round a bend and see a Rock City barn for the first time, but it was far more thrilling to find one that had slipped through the cracks of history.

Fortunately, the Lady Bird Law paint-overs have mostly weathered away, leaving the signs visible once again. The lampblack-and-linseed-oil paint Clark Byers and his crew slapped around was tougher stuff. I’ve seen barns that appeared to be held together solely by the Rock City paint. It lasted better on boards than on tin and best of all on the north-facing end of a barn. Metal roofs eventually rust, even with a good coat of paint, but the black background and, white letters oxidize at different rates, so a sign is often quite readable in two different shades of rust.

I began the project with some idealism, I suppose, even though I’m a country boy and should have known better. Expecting to find prosperous, storybook farmyards, I often came upon depressing scenes of rural desolation. Most of the barns were far from any farmhouse. Many were dilapidated, some overgrown with brush. I took what each situation gave me and tried to use it to make a photograph that expressed the spirit of the place.

Doing this, I learned to treasure the dignity and individuality of each old barn, to see beauty even in the isolation in which so many of them are ending their days. I learned that they wanted to be photographed in a direct, documentary way, without artifice. “This is the way we are,” they seemed to say. “Please let us speak for ourselves.”

So here they are.