Day 64 - Madison, Indiana to Casey, Illinois

Today was one of those sets of waking hours where we just go from one place to another. We didn't have anything on the schedule to visit, and we really didn't encounter much of anything along the way that warranted a stop. There were a couple of exceptions. We encountered one of the old Mail Pouch tobacco barns that I've been hoping to photograph, and we ran across a rather obscure reference to the Civil War, but more of that item in a moment. We were sorry to leave the Madison, Indiana, camp (photo left), but as usual, the road was calling.

We encountered the mail pouch barn, naturally, on a road where there was no hope of stopping. The travel lanes were narrow and the shoulders almost non existent. But after I had continued on for about a mile the idea of missing yet another of these barns got to haunting me. So, as soon as I could get turned around I went back. As I approached the barn from the opposite direction I spied a tiny patch of dirt just big enough to pull into if you were driving a small Honda car. Throwing caution to the wind, I pulled into the spot anyway, nearly scrubbing the RV's steps off the rig in the process as I slowed to a stop on the slightly depressed shoulder area.

Then I set off along the various neighbors' front yards until I could line up my shots. I tried to keep as close to the busy road as possible, but not so close that I would get buffeted by the 18-wheelers and dump trucks that seemed to be present in larger than expected numbers this morning.

After getting the shots, I trudged back to the rig, cranked her up and pulled into a nearby side street, backed into another "T" intersection further along, and we were on our way in a jiffy. I'd gotten my shots at long last.

For those of you who don't know the history of our country's 20,000 mail pouch barns I offer Wikipedia. I would normally paraphrase, but the article is short. Have a look:

"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 (Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company), based in Wheeling, West Virginia. At the height of the program in the early 1960s, there were about 20,000 Mail Pouch barns spread across 22 states.

These barns can be found in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, Wisconsin, West Virginia, and California (Ontario, on Jurupa and Turner) although an increasing number have fallen into dilapidation or have been demolished. The barns, usually hand-painted in black or red with yellow or white capital lettering, read as follows: "Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco Treat Yourself to the Best." Sometimes they are surrounded on the left and right by a thin vertical blue border.

Initially, barn owners were paid between $1 and $2 a year for the advertisement, equivalent in 1913 dollars to about $20–$40 today. But more importantly, they received a much desired fresh coat of paint to preserve the integrity of the wood. Mail Pouch painted their message on one or two sides of the barn (depending on viewability from the roadway) and painted the other sides of the barn any color the owner wished. Many of the barns were repainted every few years to maintain the sharp colors of the lettering.

After World War II, many of the barns were painted by Harley Warrick of Belmont County, Ohio. He once estimated that he had painted 20,000 barns in his life, spending an average of six hours on each. Warrick claimed that he always began each barn with the "E" in the word "Chew". Other barns were painted by Mark Turley, Don Shires, and several others. Their initials remain preserved on some of the barns with the date of the painting. These initials can be found on the blue border surrounding the front side, or nearer to the roof.

The Highway Beautification Act of 1965, which sought to restrict the vast number of local advertisements that were being placed near highways, exempted Mail Pouch barns since they had been deemed historic landmarks.

In 1992, the owner of Mail Pouch Tobacco at the time, Swisher International Group, decided to suspend the use of barn advertisements when Warrick retired.

In the heyday of barn advertising (c. 1900-1940) many companies paid farmers to use their barns as roadside ads, with other tobacco products (such as "Beech Nut" tobacco) and local feed and grain stores being the most common, but Mail Pouch was the only product advertised in so widespread and consistent a manner in this fashion."

And now for our other discovery.

We stopped in the town of Vernon as we headed up Route 7 out of Madison, Indiana, this morning, not for any particular reason, but just because we spotted this marker (photo right) from the road which happened to run right by the town square. Like several dozen town squares we've seen in the last two months, the ring of buildings surrounding the court house was sort of sad and dilapidated looking (photo left), but the shade thrown off by the courthouse ancient landscape trees looked cool and very inviting

Feeling the need for getting out of our seats for a few minutes, whatever the excuse, we decided to check out the marker for John Hunt Morgan and enjoy some of that shade. Naturally, what with all the Civil War museums that have captured our attention this trip, we had heard Morgan's name on more than one occasion. But neither of us knew anything about him, well, other than the fact that he was a Confederate cavalry officer.

So it came as a big surprise when we read the marker at left and found out that Morgan is the man responsible for bringing a bit of the Civil War to several northern states where precious little fighting had taken place on their home ground.

Morgan's raid got started shortly after the Confederate defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. According to Wikipedia, "For 46 days, as the rebels rode over 1,000 miles (1,600 km), Morgan's Confederates covered a region from Tennessee to northern Ohio. The raid served to draw the attention of tens of thousands of Federal troops away from their normal duties, and strike fear in the civilian population of several Northern states.

Repeatedly thwarted in his attempts to return to the South by hastily positioned Union forces and state militia, Morgan eventually surrendered what was left of his command in northeastern Ohio. He escaped through Ohio, and casually took a train to Cincinnati, where he crossed the Ohio River.

To many Southerners, the daring expedition behind enemy lines became known as The Great Raid of 1863, and was initially hailed in the newspapers. However, along with Gettysburg and Vicksburg, it was another in a string of defeats for the Confederate army that summer. Some Northern newspapers derisively labeled Morgan's expedition as The Calico Raid, in reference to the raiders' propensity for procuring personal goods from local stores and houses."

If you'd like to read the entire Wiki article, and I recommend it, here's the link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan%27s_Raid