Many barns in the United States were painted at one time, most of them a solid color, usually red or white. A small proportion of barns were further embellished with decorative painting or commercial advertisements.This creative project studies such decoratively painted barns. It examines the reasons barns were painted, the materials and methods used in painting, and color preferences. It describes the four major types of decorative barn painting, and it traces the history of advertisements painted on barns, with special focus on the advertising campaign for Mail Pouch Tobacco.The project also includes a survey of the decoratively painted barns within a seven county region in southeastern Indiana and a preservation strategy for those barns. The region, which encompasses Dearborn, Franklin, Jefferson, Jennings, Ohio, Ripley, and Switzerland counties, was chosen because it has a relatively high concentration of Mail Pouch Tobacco advertisements and because it remains very agricultural in nature. The barns in the survey area remain in their rural historic context.A list of Mail Pouch Tobacco signs in the survey area was available as a result of prior research by others. The survey was conducted by driving the roads on which Mail Pouch signs had been recorded previously, looking also for other barn advertisements and decorative painting along the route. For each example noted, information was recorded on a survey form about the location, condition, and function of the barn as well as the type of painting, and photographs were taken in both black and white and color.As part of the preservation strategy, three driving tours were devised, and a full-color brochure describing the driving tours was designed. Application was made for a grant to fund production of the brochure for distribution to county visitor's bureaus and historic preservation agencies in the seven surveyed counties. If the grant is received, One thousand five hundred copies of the brochure will be printed. / Department of Architecture