See Rock City, and Seven Barn Rooftops Worth of Myth

Somewhere around the year nineteen thirty-five, a man named Clark Byers started painting barns. His employer was Garnet Carter, the developer who had opened Rock City on Lookout Mountain in May of nineteen thirty-two. The attraction occupied eighteen acres of the Georgia side of the mountain's crest, a path winding through massive ancient rock formations, caves, and views that on a clear day stretched across a landscape the attraction claimed encompassed seven states.

Carter had an idea for advertising. He hired Byers to approach farmers along major roads in the Southeast and Midwest and offer to paint their barn roofs free of charge, in exchange for one message: See Rock City. Byers painted over nine hundred barn roofs and walls across nineteen states between nineteen thirty-five and nineteen sixty-nine. The campaign became one of the most recognizable pieces of roadside Americana in the country. Generations of children grew up asking their parents what Rock City was while watching barn roofs roll past.

The seven-state claim has been contested by scientists. A University of Tennessee researcher, when asked to formally evaluate it in two thousand seven, noted that the claim refers to seeing elevated terrain in those states, not the states themselves, and that the claim was established before automobile pollution and coal smoke reduced long-range visibility significantly. His conclusion was essentially that it was not scientifically significant.

Rock City is still there. The ancient rock formations are genuine, eight hundred million years old, shaped by geological forces that predate the Appalachians. The barn advertisements are still there too, those that have survived. The painted rooftop that told American families where they were going has become, in its way, a monument to a particular era of the road.