Clark Byers, 89; Painted Slogans on Barn Roofs

See Rock City. When You See Rock City, You See the Best. To Miss Rock City Would Be a Pity.

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Clark Byers, the former $3-a-week buttermilk bottler who traversed 19 states for more than three decades painting those slogans and others on some 900 barn roofs, has died. He was 89.

Byers died Thursday in Trenton, Ga., of complications from a heart attack. He had been in poor health for the last three years.

“I bet more people have seen my signs than any other person’s work in America. I’m proud of being a part of Southern history,” the self-styled artist told the Atlanta Journal and Constitution in 1997.

His work, which once covered the Midwest as well as the South, was done between 1936 and 1968 to tout a 10-acre tourist site atop Lookout Mountain, which straddles the state line between Tennessee and Georgia.

Rock City -- seen by fewer people over the decades than the barn roof advertisements pointing to it -- was opened to the public May 21, 1932, by Garnet Carter. A miniature-golf magnate, Carter hoped to make money during the Depression by asking people to pay to walk around the rock garden created by his wife, Freida, in a setting of natural boulders. A conservationist before her time, she added some 400 indigenous plants to her 4,100-foot path through the rocks.

Byers and barns entered the picture a few years later when Carter’s Chattanooga advertising friend, Fred Maxwell, suggested Carter lure passersby with blockbuster come-ons painted on the huge barns that loomed beside rural two-lane highways.

The simple but hard-to-miss signs, Carter decided, could hype Rock City as “the Eighth Wonder of the World” or promise a view of “Seven States from Rock City.” The latter was true, at least on a clear day, when a viewer could stand at Lover’s Leap and peer into Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

Dubbed “barnyard Rembrandts,” Carter and Byers spread the word on barns from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Byers set off in an old truck with ropes, a ladder, two assistants, and black and red paints. He could paint six barns in a day, grossing $40 per barn.

“I didn’t pass up a good roof,” Byers told Associated Press in 1998. “I felt obligated to Garnet Carter to find the best roof I could.”

Byers coaxed farmers into turning their barns into billboards by offering them the partial paint job, renewed every two years, and a few Rock City souvenirs such as thermometers and bathmats. As the farmers became more sophisticated, Byers handed them $3 or $5, even as much as $20.

Through the years, Byers ingrained “See Rock City” into Americana so deeply that the slogan and its offshoots were parodied in cartoons and copied as valued graffiti on British subways, French restrooms, Hong Kong hillsides and German walls. Just as soldiers inked “Kilroy was Here” during World War II, younger troops scrawled on a post exchange wall in Vietnam, “Only 13,000 miles to Lookout Mountain,” and mounted a Rock City birdhouse in the Kuwait desert during the Gulf War.

The birdhouses, which recreate the painted barns in miniature and remain one of Rock City’s best-selling souvenirs, were an accidental invention by Byers. The painter, who declared himself such a “nut for Rock City” that he once painted “See Rock City” on the roof of his own home, had made a miniature painted barn as his mail box. When the U.S. Postal Service objected, Byers turned his miniature into a birdhouse.

Rock City, now run by Carter descendant Bill Chapin, continues to attract some 500,000 visitors a year. But Byers’ “See Rock City” barns are fading into history.

Lady Bird Johnson’s Highway Beautification Act of 1965 curtailed painting new barn roofs with Rock City slogans, and even required that some existing ones be painted out. Changes in farming led to the deterioration and dismantling of traditional barns, and growth of the Interstate system lured drivers off the slower, smaller rural highways.

Byers continued to repaint some Rock City barns until 1968 when he was working on a roof near Murfreesboro, Tenn., and came into contact with a stray electrical wire.

“They said I was hit with 7,200 volts ... enough to kill a dozen mules,” he said in 1997, recalling the shock that temporarily paralyzed him and ended his painting career.

Still, Byers’ work lingers. Three states -- Tennessee, Ohio and West Virginia -- declared the barns historic sites, and Tennessee boasts most of the 90 or so that remain.

Rock City in 1997 commissioned photographer David B. Jenkins to produce the coffee table book “Rock City Barns: A Passing Era,” with 104 color and 170 black and white photographs.

After his barn-painting career ended, Byers went on to own and operate Sequoyah Caverns and Campground in Alabama, and later had a small farm in Georgia.

He is survived by his wife, Frances; two sons, James and Richard; and two daughters, Nancy Newgard and Emma Hilliard.