The Surprising Explanation Behind Old Farmhouses Almost Always Being White

The white farmhouse isn’t the only thing that you’ll see a lot of as you drive along. Many of the farms you pass feature windmills — but they don’t look like the type that you’d grind corn with. Nor are they the modern sort that drive turbines to create electricity. There are also a lot of red barns. Indeed, the stereotypical American farm would have all three: a white farmhouse, a red barn and a windmill.

Looking first at barns, we might ask why farms even have them. Well, it isn’t just to charm people from the city who’re visiting on a daytrip! They have functions that are vital to farmers. Those functions have altered over the years, with advances in machinery and practice in the world of agriculture — but some things never seem to change.

Barns have several uses. On a dairy farm, they’re central in keeping the animals out of bad weather and as places for milking. They’re areas for storing animal feed as well. On an arable farm, they’re also used to store crops. And it may not have been the case back in the day when they were first built, but nowadays, a barn’s a good place to keep vehicles.

Farmers haven’t always restricted barns to one of these purposes, of course. For instance, a farmer might use a barn for milking, but then they’d keep hay on the upper level to feed the cows with. Another farmer might also house their horses in the same barn that they used for milking.

You can imagine that the more purposes you’d have for a barn, the larger it’d have to be. So barns that were big would instill pride in their owners. People say that farmers of German origin, when they came to construct their farms, would focus on the barn before they even considered their house!

Some barns had more social uses. Carla Due explained this when speaking to Nebraska’s Wessels Living History Farm. “If they had a real nice barn, they would have a barn dance up in the haymow before they started putting up hay,” she recalled. “And those were wonderful because the whole neighborhood got together, just brought whatever you had and had lunch together.”

Farmers didn’t have to stick to one barn, either. A lot of them would have a whole bunch of structures. This was increasingly true when mechanization started to be a bigger part of agriculture, as most farmers will store machines in sheds. And across the middle of the country, farmers mixed grain and stock-rearing, so they’d have little hog barns and chicken coops.

So pretty much wherever you go in the United States, you’ll see barns, but they do differ from place to place. In the southern states, the warmer weather means there’s less of a requirement for big barns to keep the animals in. The animals just hang out in the open air instead. So you’ll tend to see smaller barns that have distinct functions, such as tobacco-curing.

Time’s seen big changes in the use of barns. During the 1940s work horses were largely phased out. Cowboys would still employ them in the ranching and cattle-rearing states of the West, but they weren’t used any more as draft animals. So their quarters were pulled out of the barns, and the buildings were turned over to tractor parking, with bigger doors now needed to allow the machines to enter.

Technology also saw the end of corncribs, as the corn combine meant that they were no longer useful. Now barns featured massive drying areas that stored the kernels. Similarly, as hay bales became enclosed in plastic, hay barns became less necessary. And where they still existed, they changed, with the old systems of moving hay becoming automated.

The appearance of the barns changed, too, as the traditional wooden structures gave way to metal. So the stereotypical look of farms became less common, shifting to more functional materials. The old farms haven’t vanished, of course, even if these days you’re more likely to see a metal shed than a red barn and windmill.

These days, the windmills have often rusted a bit, since they aren’t built so much anymore, though they’re still in use. But why were they built at all? Well, mostly they drive pumps that pull water up from the earth to be drunk by the animals. That’s right: they’re like wind-driven spigots for cows!

The way it works is as follows: wind makes the windmill turn, and it functions as a lever for the pump. The pump pulls up water from aquifers, which aren’t far below the ground, and it gushes into tanks. When the tanks are full, the windmill’s disconnected from the pump, which comes to a halt. Windmills can irrigate fields in this manner as well.

These days, farmers put in more up-to-date windmills that work as turbines. They generate electricity from the wind, which in turn powers irrigation. It’s an especially useful method in places such as Afghanistan, where windmills have, according to the U.S. Department of Defense, sometimes replaced generators powered by diesel.

Another advantage of having a windmill is that a farmer can ensure that their water doesn’t get the chance to stagnate. What often happens on a farm is that water sits in a reservoir ready for use around the farm. This may result in stagnation, though, unless it’s aerated. Which is where the windmill comes in, pushing air into the water.

So that’s windmills, but what about the barns? Why are they red? Well, some have suggested it’s to stop cows getting lost when they’re coming home. That can’t be it, though, because cattle can’t tell the difference between red and green. Another hypothesis is that they’re red because Scandinavians used the color, trying to make the barns look as though they were constructed from bricks.

That this isn’t true becomes obvious when you learn that the first Europeans to arrive in New England didn’t even paint their barns. They just couldn’t afford to do so. But that meant the rain and wind wreaked havoc on the wooden the structures. So come the end of the 18th century, they’d concluded that they needed something to cover them with.

And amazing as it may sound, they settled on a mixture of rust and oil. Now this didn’t leave the barns the striking red that we’re used to seeing. Nope, it tinted them in a kind of dark orange. The rust, or ferrous oxide to get technical, proved a good agent for tinting the “paint” and didn’t cost much.

In fact, the ferrous oxide could be gotten from the soil. Then the farmers would blend it with lime and skimmed milk. They’d also use linseed oil, which they could make from vegetation, and that mixture left the wood coral in color. Very fetching! They soon found that coating them with these materials made the barns less in winter.

Farms usually had lots of rust to hand, and it had two really useful properties. These didn’t include turning the mixture red, though. No, they were that it’s fatal for mosses and fungi, and that it made a useful ingredient in sealants.

But not all barns were painted red. Nope, in Kentucky many farmers coated their barns with creosote, which made the buildings black. This kept termites out of the wood, and that wasn’t the only benefit. A black color also makes the inside of a barn toasty, which is really handy when you’re trying to cure tobacco. The idea caught on, so it became a style choice for other farmers in the state as well.

Barns aren’t the only things with an interesting color on farms, wither. There are also porch ceilings, for instance, which are often blue. In the south of the U.S., a sort of blue-green called “haint blue” was chosen to keep “haints,” or ghosts, away. And in Victorian times, people used blue to paint the ceiling of their porches because this looked like the sky on a nice day — making the porch welcoming on rainy days as well.

Shutters were often colored in a pretty emerald shade. This came after a pigment called Paris green had been developed in 1775. It was colored with arsenic, which is a deadly toxin. So you probably wouldn’t want to lick the shutters, but they were pretty good at keeping mosquitoes at bay!

But what about the farmhouses themselves? Why were they white? Well, just like the barns, it was too costly to paint them, so farmers needed a cheap alternate. That came in the form of whitewash, which is a mixture of lime, salt and water with other things, such as pine tar or molasses.

Though these days we think of whitewashing as being a stopgap solution, it’s good for many years when it’s put on properly. The solution’s very thick and can prevent the weather from getting to the wood. This allows it to protect the structure for decades. And long-lasting paint obviously appealed to busy farmers.

It was also economical to produce. The farmers didn’t have to pay for lime if they could find limestone, and if they couldn’t, they could simply burn the shells of mollusks. When you consider that paint was a costly luxury for most farmers, you can see why something you could just make yourself appealed to them.

It wasn’t just the cost that made whitewash attractive, either. Another benefit is its lack of toxicity for animals. That’s right. You don’t have to worry that your pigs will get sick if they chew on your paint, and no gases are given off that can hurt them. It also doesn’t contain lead, which for a long time was found in paints.

The chief ingredient of whitewash is lime, which has many uses. It keeps things smelling fresh by covering over bad smells. Insects don’t like it, and if your farm was somewhere warm and wet, the lime would prevent the growth of mildew. It was particularly useful for dairy farmers because it’s antibacterial.

This ability to kill bacteria makes treated wood not only look cleaner than stuff you haven’t whitewashed, but also actually be cleaner. So it’s really useful for the inside walls of a kitchen, for instance. And fungi and mold don’t do well when they try to grow on wood that’s been whitewashed, very handy if you want the wood to last.

And while whitewash blocks out nasties, it does allow water to get through, so moisture can enter and exit the wood. That’s good because it means that it doesn’t get stuck under the whitewash. As a result, the wood doesn’t rot as much as it would if the water did get stuck inside it.

Remember the black barns? Well, you don’t always want the interior of a barn to be too warm. So whitewash can help. Use it on the roof of a building, and the inside will be cooler by as much as 10°F than one with a dark roof. You can use it to protect from rusting and on trees to keep bugs away as well.

Using whitewash also doesn’t require any special techniques. You can whitewash a house very rapidly and, in a big advantage for busy farming families, everyone can join in the chore of painting. Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer famously whitewashed the fence of the family residence, and that was entirely feasible — kids can easily handle the task.

So whitewash became incredibly popular, and people were still using it in the 1900s due to its reputation for good hygiene. But in time paint began to dominate. Farmers didn’t want to lose all the benefits of whitewash, though, so they still painted their houses in white, even if they were now using premixed paint.

Farmers probably didn’t invent whitewash, though, at least not American ones. That’s because it’s been used for many thousands of years. In ancient Mesopotamia, sometime in the 3000s B.C., people were whitewashing buildings, including the White Temple, which was coated inside and out. And the substance may be older even than that.

It was used in ancient Egypt as well. We know that because excavators found the substance on the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. And it continued to be used into the times of ancient Greece and Rome. Yes, the Colosseum was coated in whitewash, and so was the Acropolis in Athens.

The pale liquid even turns up in the Bible, when Jesus castigates some of the day’s religious figures in the Book of Matthew. The Messiah says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.”

Whitewash stayed in use throughout the Dark Ages and into the medieval period. Two massive fires struck England in 1135 and in 1212, with the latter resulting thousands of deaths. The authorities then demanded that people who lived in towns use whitewash on their houses so that they wouldn’t catch fire again.

Mind you, whitewash in the distant past wasn’t necessarily the same stuff as U.S. farmers later used, though lime was often part of the mix. King Tut’s tomb was daubed with a wash mixed with milk, but elsewhere people used flour, oyster shells or eggs. There were no hard and fast rules for making the white liquid, then, except of course the resulting color.

So the material had a long history and was pretty commonplace. When the colonizers then came to America, it shouldn’t be surprising that they used whitewash to keep everything fresh and clean. And to this day, farmhouses bear coatings that, even if they aren’t necessarily themselves whitewash, are supposed to remind onlookers of it.