Co-op Barn

You'd never guess it, but this barn is in the middle of the a booming shopping area in Dunlap, TN.  Ok, well, as booming as Dunlap gets anyhow:)  It's right next door to Walmart.  It only has a very small front yard, with a cash advance place on the left and a house close by on the right. 

Ok, so I just finished reading The Grapes of Wrath.  I had never read it before or seen the movie, so I didn't really know the plot.  First of all, it's the single most depressing book ever I've read.  I actually listened to it on audible, and the narrator had the most depressiong voice I've ever heard.  Not that you could have been excited reading about these tenant farmers that were kicked out of their land by the bank who decided they could make more profit by paying someone $3/day to plow the land with a tractor instead of horses.   I'm extremely intrigued by this barn.  What did this section of Dunlap look like before when it was in its prime?  Did Walmart buy out the whole farm, or were the farmers already long gone?  In my mind, the farmers that used to work the land around this barn had a bad crop one year and couldn't pay the bank loan.  The bank decided they could make a better profit by paving the land and building a Walmart.  I wonder what happened to these farmers.  Did they move on to better things? Did they make it at all?

....or it's simply a cool looking barn:)

"I never seen nobody that’s busy as a prairie dog collecting stuff that wasn’t disappointed." - The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

"They had no more the stomach-tearing lust for a rich acre and a shining blade to plow it, for seed and a windmill beating its wings in the air. They arose in the dark no more to hear the sleepy birds' first chittering, and the morning wind around the house while they waited for the first light to go out to the dear acres.  These things were lost, and crops were reckoned in dollars, and land was valued by principal plus interest, and crops were bought and sold before they were planted. Then crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money. And all their love was thinned with money, and all their fierceness dribbled away in interest until they were no longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops, little manufacturers who must sell before they can make." - The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Find this image and more like it here in the "Country Life" section of the "Fine Art Prints" gallery.