How an Ugly Barn Changed Everything - Episode 45

When Donna Sue Grove's mother bought a farm with a run down barn in Ohio at the turn of the 21st century neither she or her daughter had any idea how they were about to changed to rural landscape across North America.  In this week's episode Susanne recounts the unlikely barn quilt movement and reveals her favourite pattern.  (Don't tell anybody, the other patterns will be jealous.) 

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My website to join in our barn quilt painting experiences is www.crazy8barn.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome to the Happy to Be Canadian Podcast. I'm Suzanne Spence Wilkins, a writer who lives in rural southwestern Ontario, Canada. Each week I share an original, very short story that will have you laughing and reflecting on the simple moments of our lives. Now, on to today's episode. Happy to be Canadian, episode 45. Barn Quilt Season Begins Again. Here it is, spring 2026, and the barn quilt painting season is about to begin again. Even though I have painted some custom designs of the geometric patterns over the winter, I feel like the year begins when people come from all over southwestern Ontario to paint the smaller versions inside our beautiful eight-sided barn in Palmyra. This spring I'm offering a new event, Bring Your Kid to Barn Quilt. And it's been particularly popular with grandmothers planning to spend a special day with a grandchild. I can't wait to see how this event carries on the barn quilt tradition. If you don't know about barn quilts yet, they are the geometric patterns that are hung on the sides of barns to tell the story of the farm and the family. The barn quilt movement across North America was started by Donna Sue Groves, who was a proud Appalachian art and community promoter. In 2001, her mother, who was an avid quilter, bought a farm with a derelict tobacco barn on it in Ohio. Donna Sue joked that they should paint a quilt on it to cover it up. And they did. The artwork was popular, so Donna Sue worked with her community to create a closed line of quilts to promote tourism and economic development in their depressed area of Ohio. When she lost her community development position in the economic collapse of 2008, she pushed on with her promotion of the barn quilt trails that were springing up across the United States. About that time, a group of women in Tomiskamang, Ontario were working on the Community Beautification Committee for the International Plowing Match that was scheduled for their area in 2009. They saw an article about Donna Sue and her barn quilts in an issue of Country Woman and decided they would develop a Canadian barn quilt trail for their event. News of the barn quilt trail filtered down to southwestern Ontario to the people that would take it nationwide in our country. Denise Cornell and Mary Simpson helped their village of Wardsville create a 38-foot by eight-foot barn quilts depicting the area's history for its bicentennial celebration in 2010. And they didn't stop there. They helped to get a Sand Plains Development Fund grant in 2011 and 12 to create over 100 barn quilts in the counties of Elgin, Middlesex, Norfolk, Brent, and Oxford. With trails springing up across the southwestern portion of the province, this duo developed Ontario Barn Quilt Trails, a nonprofit organization created to help other communities make their own rural artwork and make those stories available on a website for the public to enjoy. You can view them and other Barn Quilt Trails at www.barnquiltrails.ca. This is about the time that I became involved with the Barn Quilt movement. We had opened the Crazy Ape Barn Garden in the spring of 2013 and had not developed our retail sales area. That winter, a group of women with barns and one for each group got together to launch the East Chatham Camp Barn Quilt Trail. Mary and Denise got us off on the right foot, and we painted one four by four and nine eight foot by eight-foot barn quilts inside the crazy barn that winter. We painted sheep and stars and flowers, a treasure chest and trees and a thistle. The next summer, as part of a Trillium grant, Mary and Denise organized the installation of many of these big panels on our barns all in one day. Barn quilt trails now include driving routes in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Ontario. I'm sure there will be many more in years to come. So far, we have painted nearly 300 barn quilts during our do-it-yourself events. This is special. Each one of these barn quilts, measuring 24 inches by 24 inches, has told a story. They don't always go on barns. Sometimes they go on fences or even the side of a house. Like in life, some tales are spontaneous and others have brewed for a long time. Some go back decades, and others are the start of a new telling. While I enjoy the drawing and painting of barn quilts, it's their story aspect that draws me most to this rural art form. There are hundreds of traditional designs to tell our stories, like the carpenter's star or the farmer's star or grandma's flower garden. As well as those, I have created many unique patterns at the requests of my clients. Some of those requests are intriguing, and others can be a brain drain of geometric drawing. I have given up on less than a handful of these patterns. The finished painted product of others has made me quite proud of my acquired barn quilt drawing skills. Some have even astounded me in their beauty. As we get ready for the spring season of barn quilting in 2026, I'm reflecting on the designs we have created over the years and thinking about which one is my favorite. It is like the impossible task of choosing your favorite child. While there are some barn quilt designs that have brought me special joy, I must admit my number one choice is Harry the Heron. He was not my creation. He came to me in a text from one of two sisters who wanted to paint a barn quilt in remembrance of their father, Harry. He had loved herons, and each sister was coming to paint a quilt block of a heron. They arrived with a heron sketched on a used paper sugar bag that was large enough to contain the barden quilt size drawing. I copied it onto a grid that would allow us to project the bird onto the final painting board. Since then, others have painted Harry as he's now in our catalog of designs. One woman told me that the heron was her spirit animal. And that's the beauty of barn quilts. They are meaningful. Many people think that barn quilts have a long history, maybe connected to the early German immigrants in Pennsylvania who painted stars and other hex signs on their barns for good luck or to ward off evil spirits. But you know now that this artistic trend started in the 21st century. I enjoy dispelling this myth by telling Donna C's story to my barn quilters during each event. What I love about her story is that how a little idea started in the middle of nowhere to help a forgotten community rise to new heights. By just doing, they created an international movement in less than 20 years. Think what could happen if you took one of your good ideas and act it upon it in your hometown. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Happy2Be Canadian. If you would like to receive an email each Saturday morning that features new short stories and more, you can sign up on my website, www.crazy8barn.com. If you would like to meet me in person and discover another way that we tell our rural stories, please join me at a Barn Quilt Painting Workshop at our beautiful eight-sided barn in Palmyra, Ontario, along the North Shore of Lake Erie. You can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Crazy8 Barn. If you are an Apple podcast listener and enjoyed this podcast, I would appreciate it if you could leave me a favorable review. And that lets Apple know that Happy to Be Canadian is a valuable podcast and it shares it with other potential listeners. I'm Suzanne Spence Wilkins, and I'm Happy to Be Canadian.