468
Why are barns in the United States often red?
(i.imgur.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
468 points (97.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43944 readers
578 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Idk if this is true for the US but where I live in Scandinavia red is a common house colour because historically it was a cheap colour you could get from mixing red ochre and oil, so red barns aren't uncommon. Then again the US midwest does have a lot of Scandinavian immigrants so it might've bled over culturally because there's lot of farms up there?
That’s a pretty good hypothesis 🤔
Red is the traditional color of painted wooden structures pretty much everywhere, think of Chinese temples for example. Black tar is another common one. Cave paintings typically used red too.
Not sure about the chemical properties but I was always told they were red because that was the first color paint to be mass produced cheap enough for farmers to be able to coat their barns in.