By Jim Hagarty
2005
Last week, an old 19th century barn on a farm my parents sold almost 30 years ago now, was removed by its current owner, the structure having outlived its usefulness. My father did the same to a barn on another farm he owned, when that one too, had had its day.
When I heard the news about this latest barn coming down, I felt an immediate surge of sadness and regret. Over the years since we moved away in 1979, I have often driven by the farm and looked in at the barn, fully intending to ask the owner if I could take one more walk through it. But, life travelling at the speed of light, as it does, I never got around to it.
To someone not raised on a farm, an old barn wouldn’t represent much more than a quaint collection of weathered gray boards (ideal for rec rooms), field stones and roof steel. But to me, each of the barns on our three farms had its own personality and now contains its own assortment of memories, good and bad.
The barn that came down last week was located, not on our home farm, but directly across the road from it. It was a lonely old building; by the time I became aware of it, as a kid, it had already lost the house and other outbuildings that once graced the farmyard in its earlier, more glorious time. And while it was never the best-looking barn around, it did its job.
But I always had mixed feelings about it. For one thing, it had no electricity, and if a teenage boy dawdled too long at his chores, he might find himself forking down the hay in the coming darkness, which was not a pleasant experience for someone with too vivid an imagination. I confess here and now that some evenings, the cattle might have gotten a bit less than their required feed entitlement.
The barn’s upstairs floor was dotted with the requisite holes for tossing down straw and hay, and while it seemed my brothers and I knew the place like the back of our hands, we took turns falling down those holes. My brother survived a trip down one of them while playing hide-and-seek with friends, going the extra mile not to be found. I was not quite so lucky, breaking my arm during one descent into the cattle feeder below and spending the next long while sporting a cast. The upside, however, was the instant celebrity status the cast conferred upon me at our one-room school.
Another time, I fell through a straw hole into the middle of the stable, spooking the cattle, which then stampeded out. My dad watched in dismay from the feeder, knowing he couldn’t reach me, but the cattle somehow all went around or jumped over me, leaving me alive to tell the tale.
Outside was a 40-foot-high concrete silo and though nervous of heights (to this day), I somehow managed to climb up the outside rungs to the top now and then for a magnificent – if brief and shaky – view of the surrounding area.
My father told me a tale of his own that happened to him in that barn. One day, in the wooden granary upstairs, he discovered a rat and trapped it in a corner by jamming a shovel on its tail. The rat, he said, squealed as loudly as a pig and, hair rising on the back of his neck, my dad looked up to see other rats’ heads poking through holes in the granary walls, as they were coming to the rescue of the captured one. Having lived all his life around animals, Dad was no coward, but that day, he fled the scene.
I remember, too, the many good times filling the barn during haying season and the harvest (our term for taking in the grain and straw). And likewise, the early fall corn harvest, when the air was cooling off, and the hundreds of loads of corn we drew through the bunker silo next to this barn. Most memorable was the day two retired farmers hired for the job managed somehow, in an open 40-acre field, to crash their tractors head on, a feat they had a lot of trouble living down.
Then there were winter evenings when I practically cried as I almost froze, helping my dad loosen up the corn in the silo so the cattle could munch on it. All the time, I looked at our old brick house across the road, smoke rising from the chimney, lights streaming out across the snow, and never wanted to be somewhere so badly.
One day, when my younger brother was home alone, a storm came up, and he saw lightning strike a lightning rod on the barn’s roof. Not much damage to the roof, but a heck of a fright for a boy.
Tragically, long after we sold the farm and moved away, and the barn became vacant, it was used successfully by someone intent on self destruction who randomly chose it as the place to end her days. If barn walls could talk, they surely would laugh and cry.
I knew only a few things that took place in that old building. My dad could have told about many more. And still more stories could be related by the farmer and his family who put up the barn in the first place so long ago. It was far more than a bunch of boards, steel and stones. All barns are.
The current owner of the barn carefully recycled the entire thing. All of the wood was used for flooring. The hardwood beams had the nails removed and were cut down into floor boards. The barn siding was planed down, also for flooring, as were the roof boards. The concrete silo was rebuilt for use elsewhere. Only a few bits and pieces and straw were burned in a final cleanup of the site. The barn was built in 1875, the silo in 1952.
