TellZall's object for September is the Mail Pouch Barn

Barns painted with the famous slogan "Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco: Treat Yourself to the Best are both advertisements and pieces of American folk art. Once, not so long ago, these painted advertisements were common sights along the nation's roads.

The story begins about 1900 when Aaron Block, an owner of Block Brothers tobacco company in Wheeling, West Virginia, got the idea of advertising his company's products by painting signs on barns. A few years later, an unknown painter add the phrase, "Treat Yourself to the Best," and the stage was set. For more than three-quarters of a century, crews of painters traveled the Midwest, paying farmers a few dollars for the rights to put the signs on their barns. The farmers made a few dollars and got one side of the barn painted. Travelers in automobiles constantly saw the Mail Pouch message - and perhaps tried the product.

Beginning in the 1960s, Mail Pouch barns began disappearing. The high-speed Interstate Highway system drew cars away from the slower two-lane federal, state, and county roads that had been the mainstay of barn advertising. Additionally, many people objected to highway advertising, including billboards and barn painting, and the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 curtailed the practice. Also, barns themselves began to disappear as agriculture underwent changes.

The last of the Mail Pouch painters was Harley Warrick, who was born in Belmont County, Ohio, in 1924. After serving in Europe in World War II, Warrick returned to Ohio and found a job painting Mail Pouch barns for $32 a week. He painted thousands of barns over the next forty years, and he continued to paint after retirement as he became renowned as a folk artist of sorts. Five years before he died in 1999, seventy-plus-year-old Harley Warrick demonstrated how he painted a Mail Pouch barn. We recorded the event, and you can relive the experience at the left.