It’s an American scene so old it’s hard to imagine when it actually started: The dignified, white farmouse standing amid the acres of a homestead in the days the country was still being settled. It’s a picture so well known, it’s easy to overlook why all of these houses were painted white in the first place.
Well, we found the answer — and no, it doesn’t have anything to do with subliminal racism, so if you’re a liberal hoping to read about that, you may as well just leave now.
Part of the answer, surprisingly, has to do with the fact that they aren’t painted at all.
As Country Polish notes, farmhouses are usually adorned with a material well known to one Tom Sawyer — namely, whitewash.
Whitewash is a material made of lime, water and salt. It’s less permanent than paint, but also far cheaper for farmers looking to save a few bucks on their homes. And the advantages didn’t stop there.
“Today, lead-based paints are illegal, but back in the old days, it was much more common for paints to contain harmful chemicals,” Country Polish notes. “All types of small animals often lived around farmhouses, so you can imagine how difficult it would be to keep a curious goat or pig from getting sick while painting an entire house. Relatively speaking, coating a farmhouse with whitewash was a better way to keep animals safe.”
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8 comments:
Are white fences racist? White cars? White paper? White screen backgrounds?
You are going to be okay, just breathe, focus on your breath.
But farmers painted their barns red. Whitewash was a disinfectant, not paint, and was used on the inside of barns. Farm houses were either unpainted or painted. Whitewash was never used on the outside of buildings, it would wash of in the rain!
Never let the facts get in front of a real story - eh?
My uncle used to slosh whitewash all over the inside of his diary barn on a regular basis to disinfect it. It was required in the diary industry way back when, when it seemed like every farm was a dairy farm.
To Save $$$$ ...is Why !!!!
Barns are red for the same reason, adding Iron to the mix to tinge it red because it would heat the barn warmer in winter from the sun with the red color of the rusting iron. Later, as paint and stains were used, the traditional color stuck. The reason red paint was the cheapest was because that's what everybody ordered, so it was bought in bulk.
September 18, 2017 at 9:59 PM:
Just like Henry Ford's early automobiles; you could get any color you wanted, as long as it was black.
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