Tanya and I spent hours last night sitting in a dark, cold barn. It was great. We went to hear a talk about the Salem Area Historical Society’s preservation of a barn. The event was advertised as taking place in a school. The school was next door. The meeting was in the barn in question.
And we’re not talking about a barn converted to twenty-first-century use. Nope. No insulation or heat here. The historic barn had been taken apart, piece by piece, and repaired. Then it went up again, pretty much the same way it had the first time–in 1830.
Fortunately, a barn was the perfect venue for a talk on barns. When the speaker, Ann Arbor – based architect Chuck Bultman, told us, for instance, what a bent was, he could also show us one. The barn was “minimally wired.” That is, there was enough light for us to get the general idea of what barn part Chuck’s tiny laser pointer was tracing in the darkness. In the case of a bent, that’s the basic group of timbers that runs the length of the barn and gives it its basic shape. The bents are the first parts of a barn to be raised. The number of bents a barn has defines the number of sections, or bays, it has. For instance, four bents yield a three-bay barn. Around here, the most common type of barn is a three-bay barn.
“Barn”-style sliding doors are having a moment in house interiors these days. Those doors were not, however, the type of doors first installed in barns of yore. Vintage barns had enormous swinging doors that opened outward. Farmers adjusted them to direct air flow across their threshing floors and blow away the chaff. When the industrialization of farm systems meant that farmers no longer needed to thresh their own grain, it meant that barns no longer needed swinging doors. Lickety-split, farmers converted to barn-style doors. After all, who would continue shoveling snow out and around swinging doors if they didn’t have to?
When, after the Civil War, industrialization ushered in a new system for lifting and moving hay, barns changed again. The new system could move great quantities of hay around inside a barn, streamlining and easing processes. The downside of the new system was that it required open space right down the upper middle portion of a barn, space occupied until then by various important support structures. The new hay-moving system was so compelling an improvement over what preceded it that the support structures were moved and adapted to make way for progress.
Science brought about another barn conversion. Research showed that barns with basements were better stewards of farmers’ resources, to wit: manure stored indoors rather than left outside exposed to the elements provided better fertilizer. This new information caused barns built flat to the ground to be moved, piece by piece or occasionally as units, to foundations that gave them basements.
There was a third wave of wholesale barn conversion as well, this one as the nineteenth century was drawing to a close and the twentieth century beginning. People were moving to the cities. Dairy production was ramping up to feed them. More dairy cattle needed more hay. Barns needed more room to store hay. Barns with gambrel roofs—roofs with two distinct pitches on each side, rather than the single pitch per side of gable roofs—can store more hay. A lot more. So old barns with what we tend to think of as barn-shaped roofs were, by and large, not built that way. They were converted.
I’ve always loved barns, owing no doubt to all the happy hours I spent as a child in the (three-bay, gambrel-roofed, hay-lofted, dairy) barn on the centennial farm owned by my friend Judy’s family. My mom loved barns, too, and would often point them out as lovely and increasingly rare aspects of our heritage. She stressed the importance of maintaining their roofs, if the structures were to survive. Alas, many barns do not survive, dying where they have stood for so many years.
The Salem Area Historical Society preserved its barn as a barn. Chuck restores barns and gives them new lives, sometimes as barns, but most often not. Those of us who listened to him speak, in the historical society’s cold, dark barn last night, will look at barns more intelligently because he educated us. The hard part is having to look at them just from the outside. When Chuck sees a barn he’d like a better look at, he knocks on the owner’s door and says, “I’d like to see your barn.”
30 September 2022
Barns are interesting. There is so much though put into shape and support. My favorite barn learning moment was probably learning why they were red. Homemade paint using such things as rust and old milk. We still often paint them red as a tradition. Neat.