Old-Barns-On-My-Mind From the colonial era, to the industrial revolution, America was mostly rural America. Nothing symbolized this period more than did the great American barn. This image endures, even as we enter the twenty-first century. From New England, the south, the Midwest, the Great Plains and the far west, the barns of rural America are testimony to the people who built them, and the times in which they lived. Read more on Ezine Articles