The first mail pouch arrived in San Francisco just past midnight on April 14, 1860, to great fanfare.
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Durgon, West Virginia Coshocton County, Ohio Chester Township, Meigs County, Ohio A Mail Pouch Tobacco barn, or simply Mail Pouch barn, is a barn with one or more sides painted with a barn advertisement for the West Virginia Mail Pouch chewing tobacco company (Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company). The program ran from 1891 to 1992, and at its height in the early 1960s, about 20,000 Mail Pouch barns were spread across 22 states.
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Harley E. Warrick (October 5, 1924 – November 24, 2000), was an American barn painter, best known for his work painting Mail Pouch tobacco advertising on barns across 13 states in the American Midwest and Appalachian states. Over his 55-year career, Warrick painted or retouched over 20,000 Mail Pouch signs. When he retired, he was the last of the Mail Pouch sign painters in America. The Mail Pouch signs have become iconic and some of Harley Warrick's work has been exhibited by the Smithsonian Institution.
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That mail pouch (mochila) did not reach St. Joseph and subsequently New York until almost two years later.
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When the Mail Pouch signs were designated as National Historic Landmarks, they were exempted from regulations against tobacco advertising and Warrick continued to paint. Mail Pouch did not suspend the barn painting advertising campaign until Warrick's retirement. Warrick is cited as an influence on Scott Hagan, who is noted for his barn paintings for the Ohio Bicentennial.
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Mail Pouch Barn advertisement: a bit of Americana in southern Ohio. Mail Pouch painted the barns for free. Prior to 1999, billboards were a major venue of cigarette advertising; 10% of Michigan billboards advertise alcohol and tobacco, according to the Detroit Free Press. This is particularly true in countries where tobacco advertisements are not allowed in other media.
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On April 9 at 6:45 pm, the first rider from the east reached Salt Lake City, Utah. Then, on April 12, the mail pouch reached Carson City, Nevada Territory, at 2:30 pm. The riders raced over the Sierra Nevadas, through Placerville, California, and on to Sacramento. Around midnight on April 14, 1860, the first mail pouch was delivered by the Pony Express to San Francisco.
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Common barn advertisers include local roadside attractions, restaurants, and chewing tobacco manufacturers. The Bloch Brothers Tobacco Company is credited with popularizing the medium. The company began advertising their products on the sides of buildings in 1890. By 1925, they had moved to advertising on Mail Pouch Barns. At the program's height in the early 1960s, some 20,000 barns in 22 states displayed Mail Pouch advertising, with the greatest number in Ohio.
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The Highway Beautification Act of 1965, which sought to restrict the vast number of local advertisements that were being placed near highways, exempted Mail Pouch barns since they had been deemed historic landmarks. In 1992, the owner of Mail Pouch Tobacco at the time, Swisher International Group, decided to suspend the use of barn advertisements when Warrick retired. In the heyday of barn advertising (around 1900–1940) many companies paid farmers to use their barns as roadside ads, with other tobacco products (such as "Beech Nut" tobacco) and local feed and grain stores being the most common, but Mail Pouch was the only product advertised in so widespread and consistent a manner in this fashion.
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Among the native horses and stores captured was a Wells Fargo mail pouch lost in the earlier Paiute raid. Crook did not immediately return to Boise, but continued his expedition engaging the Paiutes again at the battle of Steen's Mountain.
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When he retired, Warrick continued to paint Mail Pouch signs on the sides of barn- shaped bird feeders and mailboxes that he would make and sell in his workshop in Belmont, Ohio. He died in a Wheeling, West Virginia, hospital in November 2000 of an aneurysm.
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Though he was not the first or the only Mail Pouch barn painter, he was the most prolific and famous. Featured in newspapers and magazines, traveling to fairs and festivals to demonstrate his skills, Warrick's fame increased appearing on Good Morning America and On the Road with Charles Kuralt.
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The next day the stage arrives with the U.S. mail. The sheriff deputizes Rachin and plans to get rid of the bounty hunter. Vance rescues Kipp, grateful that the bounty hunter is not after him. Kipp opens one of the letters in the mail pouch and looks at the contents, then looks at the sheriff.
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To be hired as a pirogue mail carrier, a candidate had to demonstrate above- average boating and swimming skills and was required to be frontier savvy. The mail pouch was strapped securely to his body in case of a boating accident. Fort Henry at Wheeling was the Mail Master's collection point for the Pirogue mail carriers.
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Rodgers had carried the first transcontinental U.S. Mail pouch. The trip required 70 stops and endured countless crashes and aircraft malfunctions. (Rodgers paid $70 a week to the Wright brothers' technician, Charlie Taylor, who followed the Vin Fiz by train and performed necessary maintenance or repairs.) The next transcontinental flight was made by Robert G. Fowler.
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Tools and artifacts used by early artisans and farmers, furniture, including domestic items, clothes, and books, as well as letters and records of Twinsburg's early days, are all showcased. The Mail Pouch Tobacco sign displayed on the barn was one of the last ones painted by the famous barn painter Harley Warrick. Twinsburg is served by the Twinsburg Public Library.
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While the money was never recovered, almost fifty pieces of evidence were collected. Kuhl, Beck, McGraw, and another acquaintance, B.E. Jennings, were caught soon after the incident occurred. Most of the evidence against Kuhl was circumstantial. However, there was a bloody palm print on a letter from the wagon's mail pouch; and Kuhl became the first American convicted of murder based on a palm print.
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In the Old West, Cowboy Woody comes to town and notices an ad at a western post office advertising for a new mail delivery rider. He is hired but is warned about the bandit Buzz Buzzard who has been stealing the mail and killing the carriers. Ignoring the warning, Woody sets off. Eventually, Woody runs into Buzz and they begin battling for Woody's mail pouch and it contents.
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A fairly traditional 1940s scene represents the East. A postal carrier is dressed in a double-breasted uniform jacket and small round cap. He is bent over, like all the subjects in the reliefs, in this case over the front bumper of car and a mailbox attached to a fluted column. With his right hand he reaches toward the mailbox and he carries a mail pouch slung over his left shoulder.
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Warrick trained under a seasoned Mail Pouch barn painter, Maurice Zimmerman, who also painted ads for competitor Red Man tobacco, Simoniz car wax, and Minneapolis Milling Company. Warrick and a partner traveled from town to town, sometimes sleeping in the back of a pickup truck or cheap motel. They were often on the road for months at a time. With the partner painting the black background and Warrick painting the letters, they were able to paint two barns a day, taking about six hours per barn.
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This extension of control was limited to those signs visible from the main traveled way of the controlled highway and erected with the purpose of their message being read from such main traveled way. The Act also eliminated the "hiatus period" by requiring compensation for any sign lawfully erected under state law. Also, so-called "landmark signs" (artistic or historic significance), or signs painted on barns were allowed, containing messages such as "Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco." The Act authorized $50 million for fiscal year 1975.
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"Billy" Richardson, Johnny Fry, Charles Cliff, Gus Cliff The identity of the first westbound rider to depart St. Joseph has been disputed, but currently most historians have narrowed it down to either Johnny Fry or Billy Richardson. Both Expressmen were hired at St. Joseph for A. E. Lewis' Division, which ran from St. Joseph to Seneca, Kansas, a distance of . They covered at an average speed of , including all stops. Before the mail pouch was delivered to the first rider on April 3, 1860, time was taken out for ceremonies and several speeches.
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Pony Express Stables in St. Joseph, Missouri The B.F. Hastings building in Sacramento, California, western terminus of the Pony Express In 1860, the roughly 186 Pony Express stations were about apart along the Pony Express route. At each station stop, the express rider would change to a fresh horse, taking only the mail pouch called a mochila (from the Spanish for pouch or backpack) with him. The employers stressed the importance of the pouch. They often said that, if it came to be, the horse and rider should perish before the mochila did.
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Warrick was born and raised in Londonderry, Ohio, where his family had a dairy farm. When he returned from service in World War II in 1946, he began painting his family's dairy barn with a team of Mail Pouch sign painters; they suggested he join them. Upon reflection, Warrick decided that it would be better than milking his family's Jersey cows each day so he began painting with the team. Having just returned from the Army, Warrick had no other clothes, so he painted barns for the first week in his uniform.
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Other Owney tokens, trinkets, and medals are also in the NPM collection and are displayed there. One of Owney's services "Above and Beyond the Call of Duty" reported is when he stayed behind to protect a mail pouch that had accidentally fallen out of a wagon during a delivery route he was on. When the clerks returned to the main Post Office after the deliveries, not only was a bag of mail missing but so was Owney. They backtracked their steps and eventually found Owney lying on top of the mailbag.
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Mail Pouch painted their message on one or two sides of the barn (depending on visibility from the roadway, an additional ad for Kentucky Club pipe mixture might be included as well) and painted the other sides of the barn any color the owner wished. Many of the barns were repainted every few years to maintain the sharp colors of the lettering. After World War II, many of the barns were painted by Harley Warrick of Belmont County, Ohio. He once estimated that he had painted 20,000 barns in his life, spending an average of six hours on each.
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Using less leather and fewer metallic and wood components, they fashioned a saddle that was similar in design to the regular stock saddle generally in use in the West at that time. The mail pouch was a separate component to the saddle that made the Pony Express unique. Standard mail pouches for horses were never used because of their size and shape, as detaching and attaching it from one saddle to the other was time-consuming, causing undue delay in changing mounts. With many stops to make, the delayed time at each station would accumulate to appreciable proportions.
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Harley sometimes deliberately misspelled words to see how many phone calls the tobacco company would get about it. He had said that once in a while, he put three 'C's in 'TOBACCO' just to see if anyone noticed. The Highway Beautification Act of 1965, which prohibited advertising billboards within of an interstate highway, effectively ended the era of painting the sides of barns for advertising. Though nearly all other sign painters went out of business, Warrick continued to work for the Swisher International Group, owner of Mail Pouch Tobacco, painting barns along lesser roads and highways until his retirement in 1991.
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Mail Pouch Barn in southern Ohio Rock City barn in Sevier County, Tennessee Ashtabula County A barn advertisement is an outdoor advertisement painted onto the exterior of a roadside barn. Advertisers take advantage of the barns' prominence in rural landscapes, paying their owners for the right to paint and maintain logos and slogans on them. Painters of barn advertisements and other murals are known as "wall dogs". Once a common form of billboard advertising in the Midwestern and Southeastern United States during the early– to mid–20th century, barn advertisements have faded into obscurity, as many of these rural ghost signs fall into disrepair, along with the structures that bear them.
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For example, in the US, tobacco advertising was banned on radio and television in 1971, leaving billboards and magazines as some of the last places tobacco could be advertised. Billboards made the news in America when, in the tobacco settlement of 1999, all cigarette billboards were replaced with anti-smoking messages. In a parody of the Marlboro Man, some billboards depicted cowboys riding on ranches with slogans like "Bob, I miss my lung." Likely the best- known of the tobacco advertising boards were those for "Mail Pouch" chewing tobacco in the United States during the first half of the 20th century (pictured at left).
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First, Mayor M. Jeff Thompson gave a brief speech on the significance of the event for St. Joseph. Then William H. Russell and Alexander Majors addressed the gala crowd about how the Pony Express was just a "precursor" to the construction of a transcontinental railroad. At the conclusion of all the speeches, around 7:15 pm, Russell turned the mail pouch over to the first rider. A cannon fired, the large assembled crowd cheered, and the rider dashed to the landing at the foot of Jules Street,where the ferry boat Denver, under a full head of steam, alerted by the signal cannon, waited to carry the horse and rider across the Missouri River to Elwood, Kansas Territory.
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Years later, a W. B. Richardson (1851–1946) claimed to be the Pony Express rider denied the honor, in an article titled "Uncle Billy Richardson, 91 Today, Disclaims Fame." W. B., who would have been about nine or ten years old the day of the historic ride, boasts that his half-brother Paul Coburn, who was the station manager, "accidentally" threw the "mail pouch" on his pony instead of Fry's horse and so he made the ride.Johnson William Richardson biography at xhomestation.com Supposedly, Richardson rode the first blocks from the stables to the river, where the pouch was handed to Fry, who rode the ferry to Elwood, Kansas and then took it on to Seneca, Kansas.
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The first transcontinental flight across the United States was made in 1911 by Calbraith Perry Rodgers in an attempt to win the Hearst prize offered by publisher William Randolph Hearst. Hearst offered a $US 50,000 prize to the first aviator to fly coast to coast, in either direction, in less than 30 days from start to finish. Previous attempts by James J. Ward and Henry Atwood had been unsuccessful. Rodgers persuaded J. Ogden Armour, of Armour and Company, to sponsor the flight, and in return he named the plane after Armour's grape soft drink "Vin Fiz". Rodgers left from Sheepshead Bay, New York, on September 17, 1911, at 4:30 pm, carrying the first transcontinental mail pouch.
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As a contemporary book recounted: "The terrier 'Owney' travels from one end of the country to the other in the postal cars, tagged through, petted, talked to, looked out for, as a brother, almost. But sometimes, no matter what the attention, he suddenly departs for the south, the east, or the west, and is not seen again for months." In 1893 he was feared dead after having disappeared, but it turned out he was involved in an accident in Canada. Owney with some of his dog tags Owney on mail pouch As Owney's trips grew longer, the postal clerks at Albany became concerned that the dog be identified, and, if necessary returned to them.
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Years later, a W. B. Richardson (1851–1946) claimed to be the Pony Express rider denied the honor, in an article titled "Uncle Billy Richardson, 91 Today, Disclaims Fame." W. B., who would have been about ten years old the day of the historic ride, boasts that his half brother Paul Coburn, who was the station manager, "accidentally" threw the "mail pouch" on his pony instead of Fry's horse and so he made the ride. His recollection contradicts all historic accounts. Clearly, J. W. Richardson, the actual rider, was not W. B. Richardson, a nine- or ten-year-old boy, but a grown man when he was hired by Lewis for Russell, Majors and Waddell.
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Originally, Bloch Brothers advertised on the walls of businesses, such as the Cottrill Opera House in West Virginia These barns can be found in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, Tennessee, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Connecticut and California (Ontario, on Jurupa and Turner, and Merced County, CA-99 and Worden Avenue), although an increasing number have fallen into dilapidation or have been demolished. The barns, usually hand-painted in black or red with yellow or white capital lettering, read as: "Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco--Treat Yourself to the Best." Sometimes, they are surrounded on the left and right by a thin vertical blue border. Initially, barn owners were paid between $1 and $2 a year for the advertisement, equivalent in 1913 dollars to about $20–40 today, but more importantly, they received a much desired fresh coat of paint to preserve the integrity of the wood.
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Fresh Vegetables, Daniel Womack, Ray Owen, Johnny Brezovec, John Gorka, Heather and Royston Wood, Mock Turtle Marionette Theatre, Rainbow Collection, An Evening at a British Music Hall, Happy Boombadears, Mountain Laurel, Mike Dugan, Bob Carlin, Mike Craver, Dave Fry, Lu Mitchell, Four's Company, Hot House, Thompson Family Quintet, Fairmount Brass Quartet, Kato, John Bauer, Broadway's Greatest Songs in Concert, Mail Pouch Express, Nashville Bluegrass Band, Kim and Reggie Harris, Peter Tork, Swing Shift, Ilona's Strolling Violins, Chorus of the Lehigh Valley, Darlene Rose and 1,001 Hawaiians, John Gorka, Roland Kushner, Lord Burgess, Happy Boombadears, Beethoven Choruses of Bethlehem, Fess Roundtree, Cranberry Lake Jug Band, Alan Gaumer Quartet, Kevin Roth, Steve Brosky, Alan Gaumer Quartet, Cornerstone, Lord Burgess, Garnet Rogers, Hanover Township Society for the Preservation of Big Band Sound in America, Harley the Clown's Washtub Circus, Diamond State Saxophone Quartet, Satin 'n' Lace, The Writer's Group: Thom Schuyler, Chris Rawlings and Gilles Losier, Ilona's Strolling Violins, Mario Acerra's Show Biz Revue, Touchstone's Theatre – "Comic Book Kid", The Writer's Group: Fred Knobloch, Steve Whitaker, Sweet Adelines, Sadie Green Sales, Johnny Brezovec, Alan Gaumer Quartet, Shanachians, Lew London, Meixner Kinder, and Pennsylvania Playhouse: "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat".
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