THE (barn) QUILT TRAIL

Donna Sue Groves wanted to surprise and honor her mother, Maxine. Maxine was an avid and somewhat well-known quilter so Donna Sue decided to paint a large quilt square on wood and install it on the family barn.  The family barn - and family - resided in Adams County, Ohio, and this was 2001. It was also the beginning of a “Quilt Trail” with tributaries now in 43 United States and 2 Canadian Provinces.

Decorating barns is not new. Barns mostly were unpainted until the mid-1800’s. By 1850, paint was affordable and easy to come by and Pa. Dutch had a heritage of painting on just about everything! It didn’t take a huge leap from painting red barns to jazzing them up with a big ol’ garnishes that came to be called “hex signs.” 

Hex signs were generally stars, triangles and flowers inside circles and there’s a bunch of theory as to their meanings, most commonly something about superstition, but those theories are all merely guesswork.  

Two important things happened to set them in front of the american folk art eye: Pennsylvania Dutch farms were/are among the tidiest communities in our Country . They are simply beautiful and happened to be set among the rolling hills of Pennsylvania, itself a lovely part of our nation. These communities were stamped with every attribute we associate with agricultural/societal perfection and populated by equally perfect people: clean, self-reliant, creative, nurturing, and successful but humble. The combination made this a microcosm so foreign to the rest of us (Disneyland hadn’t been invented yet) that it became a tourist destination and wham-o!, (2) an enterprising speculator started selling hex signs as souvenirs.

I first came across Quilt Trails in North Carolina and jumped to the obvious (and wrong!) conclusion that North Carolinians were especially clever when it comes to crafts and how to market them. We began seeing squares on barns when we visited Penland. N.C. still holds a special place in my estimation; you can actually pick up tourist maps at any N.C. visitor center to follow barn trails. Digging a little further, I came across a web site for Ontario, Canada, where they hold workshops where you can design and paint your own squares and spares for people who agree to install but don’t want the dirty work.

Here’s a map of New York with counties that have quilt trails.  Just like us Yankees, however, nobody seems to know how to put it all together in a tourist package deal. Here’s another site that describes the mechanics of the whole enterprise.  

Or you can join me some summer day when I plan to paint my own barn quilt square.