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A Mail Pouch Tobacco barn, or simply Mail Pouch barn, is a barn with one or more sides painted with a barn advertisement for the West Virginia Mail Pouch chewing tobacco company (Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company). The program ran from 1891 to 1992, and at its height in the early 1960s, about 20,000 Mail Pouch barns were spread across 22 states. [1]
These barns can be found in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Connecticut and California (Ontario, on Jurupa and Turner, and Merced County, CA-99 and Worden Avenue), 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: "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 visibility from the roadway, an additional ad for Kentucky Club pipe mixture might be included as well) 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 ads were painted by Harley Warrick of Belmont County, Ohio. [2] He once estimated that he had painted ads on 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, Dick Green and several others.[ citation needed ] 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. [3]
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 (around 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.
Maysville is a home rule-class city in Mason County, Kentucky, United States, and is the seat of Mason County. The population was 8,873 as of the 2020 census. Maysville is on the Ohio River, 66 miles (106 km) northeast of Lexington. It is the principal city of the Maysville Micropolitan Statistical Area, which comprises Mason County. Two bridges cross the Ohio from Maysville to Aberdeen, Ohio: the Simon Kenton Memorial Bridge built in 1931 and the William H. Harsha Bridge built in 2001.
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Pay-per-click (PPC) is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked.
Chewing tobacco is a type of smokeless tobacco product that is placed between the cheek and lower gum to draw out its flavor. It consists of coarsely chopped aged tobacco that is flavored and often sweetened; it is not ground fine like dipping tobacco. Unwanted juices are then spat.
In Canada and the United States, a railway post office, commonly abbreviated as RPO, was a railroad car that was normally operated in passenger service as a means to sort mail en route, in order to speed delivery. The RPO was staffed by highly trained Railway Mail Service postal clerks, and was off-limits to the passengers on the train.
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U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Company is an American company that manufactures smokeless tobacco products, notably dipping tobacco, as well as chewing tobacco, snus, and dry snuff. The company is a subsidiary of Altria.
The Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company of Wheeling, West Virginia was a tobacco company founded by brothers Aaron and Samuel Bloch in 1879. It was best known for its Mail Pouch chewing tobacco. Mail Pouch was a popular chew advertised on over 20,000 barns, most of which were located in the rural Ohio River Valley. Each barn had an end or side painted with the familiar Mail Pouch lettering and advertising, "Treat yourself to the best."
A ghost sign is an old hand-painted advertising sign that has been preserved on a building for an extended period of time. The sign may be kept for its nostalgic appeal, or simply indifference by the owner.
This article contains a list of tobacco cultivars and varieties, as well as unique preparations of the tobacco leaf involving particular methods of processing the plant.
Old Gold is an American brand of cigarette owned and manufactured by the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.
Harley E. Warrick, was an American barn painter, best known for his work painting Mail Pouch tobacco advertising on barns across 13 states in the American Midwest and Appalachian states. Over his 55-year career, Warrick painted or retouched over 20,000 Mail Pouch signs. When he retired, he was the last of the Mail Pouch sign painters in America. The Mail Pouch signs have become iconic and some of Harley Warrick's work has been exhibited by the Smithsonian Institution. Though he was not the first or the only Mail Pouch barn painter, he was the most prolific and famous. Featured in newspapers and magazines, traveling to fairs and festivals to demonstrate his skills, Warrick's fame increased appearing on Good Morning America and On the Road with Charles Kuralt.
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The John Wesley and Grace Shafer Warrick House, also known as the John W. Warrick Sr. House, is a house in the southern part of the city of Meadow Grove, in the northeastern part of the state of Nebraska, in the Midwestern United States. The house was built in the Queen Anne style in 1903 by a prominent Meadow Grove businessman, who made some additions and alterations in the 1920s. The builder, and subsequently his descendants, continuously occupied it into at least the late 20th century.
As nicotine is highly addictive, marketing nicotine-containing products is regulated in most jurisdictions. Regulations include bans and regulation of certain types of advertising, and requirements for counter-advertising of facts generally not included in ads. Regulation is circumvented using less-regulated media, such as Facebook, less-regulated nicotine delivery products, such as e-cigarettes, and less-regulated ad types, such as industry ads which claim to discourage nicotine addiction but seem, according to independent studies, to promote teen nicotine use.
