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  In the two years since my last barn sighting, my 110 camera had died and been replaced by my first 35mm, a point and shoot that I'd again received as a Christmas gift.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.