Visitors and neighbours sometimes ask about the pale blue paint under our eaves at 823 Jackson Avenue, and lately we’ve heard it described as “haint blue” and as a sign of the building’s early history. We love that people are curious about this feature, so we want to share the real story.
We had the eaves painted ourselves in 2016, five years after we bought the building. It was purely a design choice. We’d seen blue porch ceilings while traveling in the American South, learned about the tradition behind them, and liked the way the colour echoes the sky. Before 2016 the soffits were white, matching the knee braces. There were no blue paint layers underneath that would suggest an earlier history and we have found no evidence of any earlier use of blue paint on this building.
Nevertheless, the tradition we borrowed from is a meaningful one. Painting porch ceilings “haint blue” is associated with the Gullah Geechee people of the coastal Carolinas and Georgia, descendants of enslaved Africans, who used blue to ward off restless spirits. It’s an understandable connection to draw, especially given this building’s past as housing the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church from 1921 into the 1950s, as we’ve covered in detail in other posts. But in our case the paint is a 2016 homage to that tradition, not a remnant of it.
More information about the tradition of blue porch ceilings can be found at the links below:
https://www.historicnewengland.org/haint-blue
https://baltimorefishbowl.com/stories/the-latest-listings-by-the-whit-harvey-group-2/