Barnstar - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

A barnstar is a decorative painted object or image, often in the shape of a five-pointed star

Five-pointed star

A five-pointed star is a very common ideogram throughout the world. If the colinear edges are joined together a pentagram is produced, which is the simplest of the unicursal star polygons, and a symbol of mystical and magical significance....

but occasionally in a circular "wagon wheel" style, used to adorn a barn

Barn

A barn is an agricultural building used for storage and as a covered workplace. It may sometimes be used to house livestock or to store farming vehicles and equipment...

. They have no structural purpose, but may be considered lucky, akin to a horseshoe

Horseshoe

A horseshoe, is a fabricated product, normally made of metal, although sometimes made partially or wholly of modern synthetic materials, designed to protect a horse's hoof from wear and tear. Shoes are attached on the palmar surface of the hooves, usually nailed through the insensitive hoof wall...

mounted over a doorway. They are most commonly seen in German-American farming communities.

History

Barnstars were meant to represent the mark of the builder, but became more frequently used for aesthetic

Aesthetics

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

purposes and were added to the building after construction was complete. Enthusiasts have traced a number of wooden barnstars to individual builders in the Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...

area, where numerous examples can still be seen.

Barnstars were used in the United States during the 18th century and as late as 1870 in Pennsylvania, where their popularity increased greatly following the Civil War

American Civil War

The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...

. Their regular use preceded that time, however, and stars were commonplace on large buildings, particularly factories, in pre-war Richmond, Virginia

Richmond, Virginia

Richmond is the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the United States. It is an independent city and not part of any county. Richmond is the center of the Richmond Metropolitan Statistical Area and the Greater Richmond area...

.

Barnstars remain a very popular form of decoration and modern houses are sometimes decorated with simple, metal, five-pointed stars which the makers describe as "barn-stars". They are often deliberately distressed

Distressing

Distressing in the decorative arts is the activity of making a piece of furniture or object appear aged and older, and there are many methods to produce an appearance of age and wear. Distressing is viewed as a refinishing technique although it is the opposite of finishing in a traditional sense...

or rusted, alluding to the traditional decoration.

Other star-shaped plates

On older buildings in the Pennsylvania Dutch

Pennsylvania Dutch

Pennsylvania Dutch refers to immigrants and their descendants from southwestern Germany and Switzerland who settled in Pennsylvania in the 17th and 18th centuries...

area of the United States it is still possible to find barnstar-like building adornments which are painted, rather than wooden or metal, known as hex sign

Hex sign

Hex signs are a form of Pennsylvania Dutch folk art, related to fraktur, found in the Fancy Dutch tradition in Pennsylvania Dutch Country. Barn paintings, usually in the form of "stars in circles," grew out of the fraktur and folk art traditions about 1850 when barns first started to be painted in...

s. Strictly speaking, they are defined apart from barnstars and visually bear only passing resemblance, but the two are often confused and their names are even regarded as interchangeable. Some hex signs incorporate star shapes, while others may take the form of a rosette or contain pictures of birds and other animals.

The term barnstar has been incorrectly applied to star-shaped anchor plate

Anchor plate

An anchor plate or wall washer is a large plate or washer connected to a tie rod or bolt. Anchor plates are used on exterior walls of masonry buildings, for structural reinforcement. Being visible, many anchor plates are made in a style that is decorative.One popular style is the star anchor—an...

s that were used for structural reinforcement on buildings in the 18th and 19th centuries. These were made of cast iron

Cast iron

Cast iron is derived from pig iron, and while it usually refers to gray iron, it also identifies a large group of ferrous alloys which solidify with a eutectic. The color of a fractured surface can be used to identify an alloy. White cast iron is named after its white surface when fractured, due...

and were used as tie plates serving as the washers

Washer (mechanical)

A washer is a thin plate with a hole that is normally used to distribute the load of a threaded fastener, such as a screw or nut. Other uses are as a spacer, spring , wear pad, preload indicating device, locking device, and to reduce vibration...

for tie rod

Tie rod

A tie rod is a slender structural unit used as a tie and capable of carrying tensile loads only.- Subtypes and examples of applications :* In airplane structures, tie rods are sometimes used in the fuselage or wings....

s on brick or other masonry-based buildings. The tie-rod-and-plate assembly serves to brace the masonry wall against lateral bowing.

Some Wiki

Wiki

A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...

-based communities give their users an award called a "barnstar", as a continuation of the "barn raising

Barn raising

A barn raising is an event during which community men come together to assemble a barn for one or more of its households, with the support of women. The event was particularly common in 18th- and 19th-century rural North America. In the past, a barn was often the first, largest, and most costly...

" metaphor. This originated on MeatballWiki

MeatballWiki

MeatballWiki is a wiki dedicated to online communities, network culture, and hypermedia.Founded in 2000, its original goal was to focus on collaborative hypermedia, but current topics range from intellectual property to cyberpunk to the confusion of URIs....

. The image that is frequently used for this purpose is actually a photo of one of the structural tie plates described above, not of a barnstar proper.

History

Other star-shaped plates

See also