1986 - An offshoot of my covered bridge trips

 By 1986 I'd graduated college and decided to replace my 1979 Plymouth Horizon with something more stable.  I was looking for used cars, specifically a certain 1983 VW GTI that was one a lot in Covington, but after an unimpressive test drive, I was looking through the used car pages of the newspaper.  Dad came in, saw what I was doing, and asked why I was looking at used cars instead of new.  Well, that had never occurred to me, but it changed my thought process on the spot.  It took a few months, but after my car was hit by a drunk one night in Newport, I took the money and put it toward a 1986 VW Golf.  I'd originally been interested in a VW GTI, but I let my practical streak interfere in the decision.  My Golf was a great car, but the decision not to buy the GTI still bugs me today.  

In October of 1986 I made my first of many trips to NE Kentucky and SE Ohio trying to find the remaining covered bridges in the area.  Back in high school I had picked up a Kentucky Travel Guide at a travel show and while reading through it, I noticed that it contained listings for 17 covered bridges that then existed across the state at that time.  At that time, I decided that I'd like to one day track them down, but two of them had disappeared by the time I found myself with the time and vehicle to make the trip.  My first trip took me to Mason County, and along with the covered bridge at Dover, I also passed a Mail Pouch barn outside of Maysville.

MPB 17-78-01 was located off to the right side of KY 10 east of town.  It had been a couple of years since the last time I'd seen a Mail Pouch barn, so I pulled over and snapped a photo for old times' sake.  In the two years since my last barn sighting, my 110 camera had died and been replaced by my first 35mm, a point and shoot that I'd again received as a Christmas gift.  K-Mart was my film source by this time, and I remember buying bulk packs of film before heading out bridging, then coming home with a passenger seat full of used film canisters.  Two-day service on developing seemed like a technological miracle.  I have boxes of covered bridge pics from these days, and the occasional Mail Pouch barn always seemed to find a way into the photo session.

I visited this barn several times over the years, and always stopped for a photo.  Not sure where they are at the moment, but I did find these two.  This one was taken with my 40th birthday present, a 2.0 MP Sony CyberShot.  Rarely have I been so completely enthralled by a birthday gift.  Several years after this 2002 visit, I was heading up KY 10 anticipating another photo stop.  I didn't see it.  I turned around, went to the bottom of the hill and started over.  It took a while to sink in, but I realized it was gone.  Sometime around 2016 it had burned, a fire that was believed to have been accidental.

A second barn from this initial foray into SE Kentucky was MPB 17-78-05.  I remember passing it and turning around to get a photo, but when I got home, all I could remember was that it was likely in Mason County, or maybe Fleming County.  Years later I found Mike McCarter's Ohio Barns website online and found that it had a section for Mail Pouch barns, so I submitted my then meager collection.  Because of my lax recordkeeping, I had a couple of barns that were house in the Mystery Barn section.  This was one of them.  Sadly, in the years between this visit and the time it was identified, this barn was resided and/or painted over.

1986 also brought me to Fleming County in search of the three covered bridges that remained there.  I stumbled onto MPB 17-35-01 one evening just before I turned toward home to get ready for work.

Over the years I passed this barn several times as well.  It was a working barn as evidenced by the way the doors changed position every time I passed it.  Despite this, it never seemed to have anything done to it with regard to upkeep.

The ivy really appeared to be taking over in this summer photo circa 2000.

The last visit in 2012 made it obvious that this barn wouldn't be around long.  Not sure how long it held on, but it was confirmed gone in 2018.

MPB 35-09-04 - January, 1984

 

January, 1984 - Ain't technology great?  We jump ahead almost three years, but based on the photo, it looks like we went back a decade.  No, that's not true.  Photography two decades back put this to shame.  In fact, my great grandfather was a professional photographer, and I have some of his photos that make this look like something the bird pecked out for The Flintstones.  Most of the photos from my college years look like this.  I received a very nice 110 camera for Christmas in 1981, a second straight year for photography as a theme.  The camera had a telephoto switch and I'm sure I used it in this case.  The original photo is currently in use as a bookmark, and I run across it occasionally.  It doesn't look anything like this, being scanned and processed to attempt to make out some detail that might unlock the location.

The barn in question is actually still in question.  I know it was taken outside of Oxford, Ohio, but that opens up a chunk of SW Ohio and SE Indiana.  My friends and I were road-tripping, this time for a long weekend at Hueston Woods State Park.  Two cabins, food via care packages from our families, lots of card games and zero incidents of personality crisis.  Except for an incident with the Oxford police on Saturday night, it was a great weekend.

That said, my young life was in turmoil.  I was fairly sure that my relationship at the time was heading for an end, and that weighed heavily on my mind.  To combat this, I'd grab the keys and drive, which allowed me to think things through.  I was driving and thinking a lot on this weekend.  Sometimes more than once a day.  Mostly I was by myself, but I remember Rick going with me on one backroads jaunt.  On the occasion that I took this photo, I was alone.  My memory of it is fuzzy, but I swear it involved a late afternoon left out of the Hueston Woods driveway, which would put me on SR 732.  I had dropped some friends off at the lodge where they were going swimming, and only had an hour or so to drive, so based on Google Maps, this was likely off of 732, 177 or Oxford-Germantown Road.

I've been back to look for this, but I apparently caught it just before the end.  My wife went to grad school at Miami, so I had plenty of opportunities to hunt for it, or even anything that suggested it.  I always came up empty.

Beginnings - June, 1981

It's hard to think back to 1981 and not remember what a mess life was at the time.  I'd just finished an uninspiring freshman year at Northern Kentucky University, a year in which I explored the alphabet from B to D, got laid off from a job I had high hopes for, and took a job at a local pizza joint because we were both desperate.  To say 1980-81 had not been a rousing success would be an understatement.  From a personal standpoint, I was floundering.  

With that hammer hanging over my head, I did what any self-respecting college student would do: road trip.  My buddy The One They Call The Conehead, (from this point referred to as Cone,) suggested a trip to his parent's trailer on Brookville Lake in Franklin Co, IN.  It would be a chance to live for a week without adult supervision.  It was close enough to home to be a cheap trip, but still far enough away.  Best of all, it was free.

The trip had it all; hilarity, stupidity, a seventh first run screening of Porky's, a lack of cellphones.  We were eighteen, so entertainment was where we found it and to say we were easily amused is dreadfully understating things.  Even the one-hour trip west on I-74 produced its share of moments.  My favorite came after we exited the interstate.

We were traveling on US 52 in New Trenton, IN.  Cone was playing Eve by the Alan Parsons Project.  On 8-track.  It wasn't my first time making the trip, so I have no idea what made me tell Cone to pull over this time.  The Mail Pouch barn stood on the right side of the road.  It was easy to see why the barn was chosen.  It was impossible to miss.  I didn't notice it at the time, but there was another sign on the side of the barn that would have been for the eastbound travelers.  The westbound sign grabbed me.  I got out of the car with my camera, a Kodak Brownie variant that had been a Christmas gift several months earlier.  I knew very little about photography at the time, and just thought all cameras were the same.  As it was, the 126 camera was vastly superior to the 110 that replaced it in 1982.  I took one photo of the barn, standard operating procedure for those early, unspoiled days.

It never occurred to me that this one barn would be followed by hundreds more.  At the time I just thought it was a cool nod to a bygone time of advertising.  The photo made my wall at home and stayed there until I got married and moved out.  It wasn't the only one we saw on the trip, I can think of at least two others.  I either didn't notice the one further down the road or just didn't care.  There was a third one just outside of Metamora that I couldn't get Cone to stop for.

I was off.  Take that any way you like.

Subsequent visits to MPB 14-24-03 have shown it weathering the years to the point that I doubt many notice it anymore.  This was a 2003 visit.

This was from 2009.

And my most recent visit in October, 2022.