(Enlarge) Linda Brown, owner of Triadelphia View Farm, sitting, and her friend, Gayle Crouch, enjoyed their weekends this past summer painting this barn quilt that is more than 8-feet square and is a semi-original design. It is the first barn quilt in the county.(Photo by Brendan Cavanaugh)

mphelan@theviewnewspapers.com

If you hang it, they will come.

That's the hope of one western Howard County farm owner on the reason for hanging the county's first barn quilt.

Triadelphia Lake View Farm, in Glenelg, added the quilt to the side of its barn last month.

"It was something attractive to put on the barns and I thought the idea of several farms in Howard County participating in this would be a great idea. People could connect and come and see the barn quilts," said Linda Brown, whose family has owned the farm on Triadelphia Mill Road since 1896.

"That kind of intrigued me as a way to call attention to what each farm is doing," she said.

A barn quilt is not an actual quilt that is hung on the side or front of a barn. It is painted directly onto the wood of the barn or painted on a wooden block and then hung on the barn. The idea for a barn quilt came from Donna Sue Groves, of Adams County, Ohio, according to the Howard County Economic Development Authority, which is promoting the barn quilt project as a way to draw attention to the county's historic and family-owned farms.

According to the Adams County Ohio Quilt Sampler Project Web site, Groves created the project in honor of her mother, a master quilter. From Ohio the idea spread to Tennessee, Iowa, and other states, which offer driving routes to see all the local designs. The project begun by Groves has also shown up in Garrett County as a way for people to experience its agricultural and artistic heritage.

The barn quilt at Triadelphia Lake View farm emphasizes the Brown's Christmas trees, which they began growing in 1988. Linda Brown got the idea for her quilt from pictures she had seen of other quilts in a farm magazine about a year ago.

The design features green evergreen-type trees to depict the farm's tradition of selling Christmas trees. Brown's longtime friend, Gayle Crouch, found the design on the Internet.

Brown and Crouch painted the design on plywood last summer.

"It was kind of like a quilting bee," Brown said. "We'd get together and work on it. It was a lot of fun."

One of the most time consuming parts of creating the quilt was painting on the three coats of primer and waiting for them to dry. Originally, the Browns wanted to mount the quilt block on the roof of their barn. In preparation for the roof the quilt block was mounted by her son Jamie, and his friend, Steve Boswell, on two pieces of wood and framed in metal. But worried about exposure to the weather and that it would not be easily viewed from the ground, the Browns decided to place the barn quilt on the front porch of their barn next to the farm's store.

Brown would love to see other county farms join her in displaying barn quilts.

"Hopefully some of the farmers out here are going to be interested in doing one," she said. "We had such a great time doing it, we may do another."

That one, she said, would depict the farm's other offerings of produce, vegetables and hogs.

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