Barn Quilts - Cocke County, TN

While driving around our area I kept seeing these quilt squares on barns and I had heard of barn quilts but never really paid attention to them until now.  Barn quilts started about 300 years ago when immigrants from the Rhine area of Germany came to this country for religious freedom: Amish, Mennonites, Lutherans and other Reform groups.  Prior to the 1830's barns were not painted due to the expense of the paint but as paint became a little more affordable the Pennsylvania Dutch started painting and decorating their barns.  The barn quilt trend peaked in the early 20th Century and slowly began disappearing until the 1980's when they were revived.  Now there is a Barn Quilt Trail through out the United States and in Eastern Tennessee there are several well established one.  After talking about Barn Quilts with Lisa she became interested too so yesterday we took our first Barn Quilt tour and we decided the first one should be in the county where we live, Cocke.  Cocke County barn trail had about 8 barns listed, officially, and so I mapped out a course, grabbed my GPS (Lisa drove) and we headed out on our quest to look at barn quilts.  The first two barns on the list were in Parrottsville and when we drove up to the first one we saw the barn but the quilt on the barn was at an angle that you could not see it unless we entered the property.  This barn didn't have a road that we could see so we drove past it hoping to get a glimpse of the quilt but we could not.  So, we were on to the second barn and we had the same result.  Needless to say at this point we were thinking this could be a bust but we were determined and it was a really nice day out so we continued our quest.  We stopped for lunch in Newport before continuing on our journey.  The next barn we went to was in Newport but once again the quilt was hidden from sight.  Then next stop the address didn't exist in the GPS so skipped it because we still had more to see.  The last barn listed in Newport was our first success in seeing the barn quilt.  The quilt was called Maple leaf and it was located on Bryant's barn.  We were finally successful on our barn quilt quest so we continued on.  Our next stop was Cosby but we made a quick stop at Carver's Apple Orchard to check out their produce barn.  In Cosby we found the two barn quilts listed but neither of them were on barns.  The first one, Drunkard's Path was located on the Smokey Mountain Visitor Center in Cosby and the second one, Smokey Mountain Memories. was on a fireworks store.  The important thing is they were barn quilts.  The last barn quilt we never made it to.  It was in Del Rio but the GPS led us a stray and tried to kill us.  We followed the GPS and the further we went the roads got smaller and smaller and eventually turned into a single lane back road that was breaking away.  At that point we decided it would not be a good idea to continue and we turned around eventually.  We were on Rocky Top Road and on our drive we were twisting and turning all going up hill.  Lisa had to back down the narrow road until we got to a spot to turn.  That is not an easy feat when there is a ditch on one side of the road and about a 40 foot drop on the other side of the road.  I got out of the car and guided her down the road until we hit a turn around spot.  She did great and that was the end of our barn quilt tour in Cocke county or so we thought.  As we were heading back towards  home we did come across a barn quilt that was not listed on the tour.  It was at Rocky Top Farm View.  It was a nice one and a good way to end our Cocke Country barn quilt tour.  Even though we were not as successful as we thought we would be on our quest we still had a good time and the ride was nice; okay most of it was.  Lisa and I will be heading out on another Barn Tour but our next one will be a well established tour in Greene County.