Re: O.T...Old Barns

Posted by Hal/WA on February 17, 2007 at 22:28:26 from (66.45.175.118):

In Reply to: O.T...Old Barns posted by mike a. tenn. on February 17, 2007 at 07:39:31:

The last couple of weeks, a company has been tearing down a barn I have passed several times a week for about 50 years. It is in an area that is rapidly filling with housing developments, and I suppose the spot will have houses on it in short order.

It has been hard watching the old barn deteriorate. When I was a kid, the barn was carefully painted and its roof was totally straight. But over the last 10 years, or so, the wood shingle roof has gone bad, and some of them have blown off. If someone had put on a nice sheet metal roof, maybe the damage that obviously happened would not have occurred. The roof was getting swaybacked and some wall boards had popped loose.

The local paper had a feature about the old barn. It was built about 100 years ago as a draft horse barn for a farmer that found a deposit of clay on his property. He used many horses and wagons to haul the clay to Spokane, where it was sold to a brickworks. But that soon ended and the barn was used for various other things, including as a basketball court for a local school. In the 80's a relative of the original owner tried to raise money to restore the barn, by having barn dances. But that effort failed, and I think the relative died.

The article said that the farmer had been very particular about the lumber used to build his barn. He demanded that the lumber be knot free, which apparently was possible with the trees available at that time. The company that is tearing down the barn plans to salvage as much of the lumber as possible and make it into other things.

Unfortunately lots of times the magnificent barns people built way back when just no longer have a real use. Almost nobody has very many draft horses anymore, and the way barns were built to handle and store hay is not the way it is done now. The barn I grew up with is still being used, but the people that bought our buildings have riding horses, and still deal with small, square bales by hand. That barn would be useless to try to store large, round bales--you can't drive a vehicle inside, and it would be almost impossible to modify it so you could.

I hate to see the old barns go to heck. But it is hard to justify keeping up a building that you can't use, especially in a time when farming is such a low profit experience.

The land where the old barn has been is probably worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars. I sure don't blame the owner for letting it be torn down, especially in the poor shape it had been in lately.

One of the only things in life that is sure is that things will change....sometimes good and sometimes bad....but they are bound to change.

I too would be sad if all the old barns were gone.

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