‘Barns’ sees U.S. through new lens

When my sister and I were younger, we found ourselves often in the back seat of the station wagon on weekend trips to the country with our parents. In our case, the country was West Virginia, and we used to pass the time counting barns with the advertisements for Mail Pouch painted on one side. Whoever screamed it out first – “Mail Pouch!” – got a point.

Since we went to the same place every weekend, our uncle’s farm, we knew exactly where the marked barns were, and the game became a matter of who wasn’t daydreaming at a certain bend in the road or passing through a town.

Once we were at the farm, which was actually a pre-fab ranch on the edge of 38 unpopulated, unused, uncultivated – and to us – uninteresting acres, we had little to do. After the lawn had been mowed, stones skimmed over the tiny pond, and the TV dial turned in case something other than fuzz might be on, we were left to wander.

Inevitably, we walked to a real farm about half a mile away where there was a working barn filled with bales of hay, munching horses, countless kittens and a barking dog that gleefully greeted us. We’d climb into the loft or sit on the tractor, pretending we were farm girls and secretly forsaking our city upbringing. In those moments, we stepped back in time and even back into our younger selves. Such memories were no fun in the making for two restless teenage girls, but I look back now on those days with fondness.

Those two experiences with barns – the Mail Pouch competition and the pastoral afternoons up the country road – were what drew me to “Barns,” the first installment in the Norton/Library of Congress Visual Sourcebooks in Architecture, Design and Engineering series. “Barns” draws from the library’s extensive collection of 12 million photographs to present a visual analysis of American architecture and cultural life through landmarks. Future books in the series will explore historical periods, landscape architecture, garden design and industrial design based on the library’s full collection of books, maps, recordings and manuscripts.

The images in “Barns,” which are also collected on a CD-ROM that accompanies the book, were compiled by John Michael Vlach, a professor of American Studies at George Washington University in the District of Columbia. Vlach is a member of the board of directors at the National Council for the Traditional Arts, which produced last weekend’s National Folk Festival in Bangor.

He often attends NCTA events and arrived in Bangor last week, not to lecture about barns, which he often does, but to help with the festival. He is the type of person the festival attracts, with its rich concentration of folk music and folk arts. Vlach’s job was to emcee performances, particularly at the dance tent, and to set a folkloric tone for his segment of the event. “The place was on fire,” he said excitedly of Saturday night’s African-Cuban dance party. “People were torched, not so much dancing as standing butt-to-belly. Think about the irony of an African Cuban person torching this crowd. He had them in the palm of his hand and could have been elected mayor last night.”

The day before, Vlach sat with me on the banks of the Penobscot and spoke about his own passionate work, which goes back to the social unrest of the era surrounding his upbringing in Berkeley, Calif., and to his scholarly trips to Africa to study folk tales. Under the tutelage of one of his doctoral professors at Indiana University, he became interested in material culture, the symbols, items and artifacts of the way people live – textiles, modes of transportation, craft objects and, yes, barns.

But even before he became an expert in the fields of American studies and anthropology, Vlach, like so many Americans, had a barn story.

“My father was a farm boy in Southern California, and my grandfather had a walnut orchard,” said Vlach, who was born in 1948. “I always hung out in the barn. My grandfather used his as an equipment shed and factory base for the black walnuts he grew. My Uncle Otis, across the street, had a barn with cows and hay, and I climbed up the ladder. I went back about three years ago, and it all looked so small to me. I guess it’s the same, but it somehow isn’t as big as when I was a boy. You used to climb the ladder forever.”

Because his father was an engineer, Vlach had an early orientation to architecture, including in his family home which, for most of his childhood, was under construction. As a boy, he learned to look beyond the showy outside and into the guts of a building.

That may have informed one of his most controversial projects, “The Back of the Big House,” an analysis of the southern plantation buildings where slaves worked and lived. It was published first as a book in 1993 and then mounted as a traveling exhibition that went around the country. The photographs of slave life were abruptly taken down at the Library of Congress after black workers there complained that the images were offensive.

Barns have been a less prickly topic for Vlach.

“Barns” is arranged regionally to “convey a particular story of movement across time and space,” Vlach writes in the introduction. “Barns serve here as physical evidence of the key stages in American settlement history.”

That includes Maine, whose connected “big house, little house, back house, barn” style, as well as Acadian and semi-subterranean potato houses are featured among the tobacco and gable-entrance barns in the section.

“Maine is probably more iconographically New England now than any place else,” said Vlach. “To me, the subtle point is that you are looking at the people of America through the lens of a barn. It’s an external manifestation of a concept or a feeling. The same way you read a book, you learn how to read a barn, which connects you to a larger narrative outside the barn – economics, religion, weather.”

“Barns” is a book that explores those elements through Vlach’s accessible writing and in hundreds of black-and-white photos. Its combination of Americana, appreciation for the agrarian past and quiet nose-thumbing at modernity reminded me a bit of the National Folk Festival itself. It’s not that I don’t cherish my urban roots or the music of the city or the convenience of technology in my life. It’s that I carry with me, as I suspect we all do, some nostalgia not only for my own childhood but also the childhood of the country.

That’s what Vlach has collected in “Barns.” And even if the ladders in our childhood memories grow smaller as the years go by, his book is a reminder of just how tall they once were.

Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.