> road), it was customary to paint everything at the roadside white up to
> about 4 feet off the ground--not only fences but buildings, tree trunks,

This was also a practice in rural southeastern and northern Nebraska, but
for apparently different reasons. As I was growing up in the 1950s I got to
know three or four "prairie farm women," who went crazy (as I then thought)
painting everything white, or at least the lower section of their farm yard
fences, trees and any old farm equipment that their husbands left laying
around. Actually I think this was more often white wash and not paint as I
was once involved in a white washing episode. Early one morning I was
hanging around Charles Nicoles' place just east of Elmwood, Nebraska.
Charlie was just finishing up the milking and amusing himself by squirting a
little milk at us kids and the kittens who were lined up for a little taste
of "the sweet stuff." Charlie and Barbara, his wife, got into a little
argument because he wanted to put us to work with washing up the milking
equipment, but Barb wanted us to help with her morning's project of white
washing the interior of the milk house, an annual event of some importance
because the thick coating of lime on the walls and ceilings made it easier
to keep the surfaces clean, and the whitewash itself was considered somewhat
antiseptic. As usual, Barb won out and I ended up on the white washing crew.
When we finished the milk house we moved right outside and began slathering
the white stuff on the fence outside that ran along the laundry yard.
When we ran out of fence up by the
corn crib we painted around all four sides of the crib and started in on the
trees in
the back yard. (well away from the road) As Barb said, "keeps the place
looking real neat and clean, fresh as a breeze." I refused to put the stuff
on some young saplings because I thought it seemed unnatural to paint a
tree. Barb was a little ticked off, and I ended up walking off the "job,"
which I regretted for some time because Barb was always handing my dad and I
a loaf of her famous home baked white bread whenever we came by, but after
the white washing incident she seem to be "fresh out of bread" for the rest
of that summer. Later that fall I made up with Barb. She still counts me as
one of "her boys" and I still count her as one of my important connections
with the prarie farmlands where I grew up.

John