By Shannon Hicks

Gary Zemola is against chewing tobacco. He is not a big fan of people smoking tobacco, either, but it is chewing tobacco and the diseases associated with that habit that he doesn't want people to think he is endorsing with the replicated advertisement he recently put on the side of his restored antique barn in Sandy Hook.

With that said, the early 19th Century barn of post-and-beam construction that is the centerpiece of Mr Zemola's property at 4 Jeremiah Road has become a paean to one form of Americana that is quickly disappearing. It is also the homeowner's way of honoring one painter in particular.

Last week two of Mr Zemola's friends painted a traditional Mail Pouch Tobacco sign on the side of Mr Zemola's barn. Paul Hellrigel and Eric Uhrynowski spent a few days working in Sandy Hook, continuing the transformation of the antique barn into a beautiful work of art.

Mr Hellrigel is a childhood friend of Mr Zemola and the owner of Regal Design, an interior design business. He also does art including commissioned murals. He and Mr Uhrynowski were doing their final commission before heading to The Ingbretson Studio of Drawing and Painting in Manchester, N.H., where they were to begin participating in its modern masters program this week.

"I wouldn't have anyone else do this painting," Mr Zemola said of his friend, who was able to stencil the lettering for the project from a blurry printout of a Mail Pouch Barn Mr Zemola had located online. "He's a perfectionist.

"This is my way of keeping a tradition alive," he continued. "It's a tribute to Americana and it's also in keeping with the spirit of the barn."

Mr Zemola's barn was on Newtown Historical Society's Historic Homes & Gardens Tour in July 2004. Dan Long, an artist and former resident of 1 Jeremiah Road, was the barn's previous owner. He had the barn disassembled at its original Monroe location and then rebuilt at its current location. The barn then served as the space of Mr Long's antiques business, and also served as partial storage space.

During 1999 and 2000 the barn was renovated and made into a residence. Additions included a fireplace with four flues, three bedrooms, a laundry room, restrooms, and a garage. Its post-and-beam construction allows the barn to maintain its strength even after having been moved and renovated. Additional features include chestnut beams that were hand-hewn, and the number of original (or replaced with vintage glass) windows.

Mr Zemola moved into the barn in March 2004. The idea for putting an old-fashioned advertisement on his side of the barn came shortly thereafter, when he and former neighbors (and still friends) Deanna Young and Mark Belanger started talking one night about barnside advertisements they remembered seeing while growing up.

"We started joking about painting Jeremiah Dairy — Is The Freshest on the side of the barn, but I didn't like that," Mr Zemola said. "Jeremiah Dairy doesn't exist. I wanted something real, authentic.

"Then we started talking about the old Mail Pouch Barns and that was it. Mail Pouch is the most authentic thing because so many people remember seeing them growing up," he continued.

Mail Pouch Barns

Between 1920 and about 1992, the Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company, based in Wheeling, W.Va., paid farmers to allow painters to paint one or more sides of their barn with an advertisement for Mail Pouch Tobacco. The majority of the Mail Pouch Tobacco Barns, or Mail Pouch Barns as they are also called, were located in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and of course, West Virginia. Antique barns with a Mail Pouch advertisement can still be found, but an increasing number of the buildings have fallen into dilapidation or have been demolished.

Many of the barns were listed as National Historic Landmarks. The Highway Beautification Act of 1965, which sought to restrict the vast number of local advertisements that were being placed near highways, even recognized the art of the painters when it exempted Mail Pouch Barns because they had been deemed historic landmarks.

At the highpoint of the advertising campaign in 1965, more than 17,000 Mail Pouch Barns could be found across the country.

For many years, farmers (or barn owners) were paid between $1 and $2 for the advertising space, but they received a huge nonfinancial compensation: their barns received fresh coats of paint on a regular basis, thereby preserving the integrity of the wood. Many of the barns were repainted every few years to maintain the sharp colors of the lettering.

The barns were usually hand painted in black or red with yellow or white capital letters that read "Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco Treat Yourself to the Best." The words were often surrounded on the left and right by a thin vertical blue border.

Mr Zemola followed tradition when he decided to have his barn painted. His barn was already a traditional shade of barn red, and the letters are indeed white and mustard yellow.

They follow the pattern, in fact, of a small piece of wood Mr Zemola owns that was painted by Ohio painter Harley Warrick, one of the most celebrated of all Mail Pouch Tobacco Barn painters.

Mr Warrick was the primary painter for Bloch Brothers following World War II and he once estimated that he had painted (or repainted) 20,000 barns in his life, spending an average of six hours on each. Swisher International, the owner of Mail Pouch Tobacco by the early 1990s, decided to suspend the use of barn advertisements in 1992 when Mr Warwick retired.

Other barns were painted by Bill Hart, Bill Bucks, Kenneth Walkerman, Carl Wunelle, and Maurice Zimmerman — the original men who did Mail Pouch Barns — Mark Turley and Don Shires, and hundreds of others. The painters' initials remain preserved on some of the barns and their discovery is as exciting for Mail Pouch Barn fans (there are many of them) as finding a barn itself.

Mail Pouch was not the only tobacco advertised on barns, of course, but it does seem to be the name most people associate with barnside painted advertisements.

Red Man Beech Nut and WOW Chewing Tobacco have also been found on old barns across the country. WOW Chewing Tobacco was owned by Mail Pouch at one time. Those barns were originally painted before 1945 and very few are left.

"I really hope people don't get mad about this," Mr Zemola said last week. "I'm not trying to promote tobacco.

"To be honest, if I lived on Main Street or a busier road I wouldn't do [the barn painting] at all," he said. Because of its placement and a few large trees in the northeast corner of the property that protects its view somewhat, the barn and its new painted addition can be seen easily only by Mr Zemola's neighbors immediately across the street and those traveling east on Jeremiah Road.

"This was a cheap way that farmers would get their barns painted years ago. They didn't care about the advertising, they cared about preserving their barns," Mr Zemola said.

"This is now, I hope, something that parents can use to start an informal history lesson. They can tell their kids about these old advertising campaigns and how they benefited farmers.

"This isn't about tobacco, or even urging anyone to chew tobacco," he continued. "I'm just trying to preserve some American nostalgia. To me this is an art form."