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    American Barns
    American Barns
    American Barns
    Ebook123 pages1 hour

    American Barns

    By Jan Corey Arnett

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    About this ebook

    The heart of every working farm and ranch, the barn is an icon of rural America. This book chronicles – and celebrates – all the main types, and looks at how these treasures of early American architecture developed. It explains how a wealth of immigrant construction methods and range of environments and climates resulted in a fascinating variety of barn styles in the United States, from the earliest rare Dutch examples to simpler English types and others in more surprising shapes (round or even polygonal) crafted by the Shakers in the 1800s. It highlights the most notable, famous and historic barns that the reader can visit, and features the efforts of conservation groups to preserve America's barns and find innovative ways to repurpose these glorious old structures as homes and studios – and as living monuments of rural heritage.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateSep 20, 2013
    ISBN9780747814269
    American Barns

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      Book preview

      American Barns - Jan Corey Arnett

      A BARN BY ANY OTHER NAME

      ASK ANYONE in the United States to describe an American barn and the responses will vary. While much has been written about the American barn, there may be no singular structure that typifies it. The nation has an eclectic array of structures, many of which can legitimately be called barns. Some use the word to describe metal-sheathed buildings which arrived at around the time of World War II, but for the most part, a traditional barn is built of wood, or wood and stone. To the purist it must also be timber-framed (post and beam) and well braced or pegged since some early barns were built without the use of pegs.

      Designs which traveled to the United States with immigrants from Europe and South America as far back as the 1600s have evolved to suit the purposes, landscape, location, and natural, financial, and technological resources of the American farmer.

      Little information exists regarding what Native Americans—the first people known to call the continent home—used as barns. Resourceful and creative, most were nomadic out of necessity, so their dwellings and belongings had to be transportable. Apart from horses, livestock was rarely kept and crops fed a community for one season. Most structures sheltering humans were constructed of animal hides lashed to poles, referred to as tepees or wigwams. Permanent homes, such as those in Algonquin Indian towns of North Carolina, were lodges or longhouses, some having up to five rooms. They were made of bark, woven plant matter, and poles but unlike in parts of Europe, these were not generally shared with animals. Cliff dwellers of the southwest or mountainous populations kept supplies in caverns. Curious as it may seem, such places qualify as a barn if one accepts the broadest definition of the word as a storage place. The word barn comes from the Old English bere (barley) and aern (place), meaning a place to store barley. In Anglo-Saxon England, it was precisely that—a building used for threshing and storing grain crops and. on occasion, to shear sheep. Cattle had a cowhouse, horses a stable, pigs a piggery, and equipment a cartshed.

      A longhouse at the Museum of Ojibwa Culture, St. Ignace, Michigan.

      When colonization began on America’s east coast in the early 1600s, two of the earliest distinct barn styles came from the English and the Dutch. The architecture of the Dutch barn is similar to that of European cathedrals dating back to the thirteenth century and to European tithe barns built to store portions of crops tithed to local churches. Common defining characteristics are high-pitched roofs, low eaves, horizontal siding, and wagon doors at both gable ends. A Dutch barn frame also must have an H-bent, formed of two large vertical posts and a horizontal round-ended cross-beam, connected with mortise and tenon joints, with the tenons protruding beyond the posts. An estimated 1,600 New World Dutch Barns were built, primarily in New York and New Jersey, before 1825. These are the nation’s oldest post and beam barns.

      America’s barns are diverse and beautiful. This Midwest barn and stone silo date to the early 1900s.

      An English gable bank barn built in the 1870s, moved and restored 130 years later. The ornate cupola replicates the barn’s original, but is not common to all English barns.

      The Billy Graham Library, Charlotte, North Carolina, a facility that carries on the message of Jesus Christ that American evangelist Billy Graham preached for more than sixty years, is styled after the beloved barn on his childhood North Carolina farm.

      Architecture aside, the awe that can be experienced inside a barn when light is streaming through windows and between boards evokes, for many, a spiritual feeling. Several churches across the United States began as barns. Conversely, some churches have become barns. And in some communities, barns still serve both purposes. Utah’s Mormons do not use barns as places of worship but use a variety of buildings as tithe barns. Best known is the Lehi Ward Tithing Barn in Lehi, Utah, built in 1872. The Mormons are the only religious group known to use tithe barns in the United States.

      Many barn enthusiasts agree that the English barn remains the most commonly seen barn in the United States, but with shingles or metal sheeting in place of traditional thatch roofing, and boards rather than stick and daub siding. But the interior configuration remained the same, using the three-bay, timber-frame layout for a structure generally 30 feet

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