From "Ghost Barn" to Museum

It was with mixed emotions that I traveled the rutted farm lane up to the old barn with a band of likeminded souls this week, bent on finding a way to save it.  I was optimistic about our mission to preserve the historic structure, but saddened that this requires its relocation from the place it was raised.  If we fail to find it a new home, and quickly, this more-than-a-hundred year-old relic’s future may be only a few short months in duration.

Like many of its comrades across the Commonwealth where development pressures are reaching the boiling point, this old barn’s presence threatens “progress” as defined by people who have never tilled the land and most likely have never set foot inside a barn except to plan its demise.  Speculators who look not at the richness of the soil for growing crops, but who carve it, crush it, and bury it under concrete and macadam, have stolen this farm’s future.

I’m shocked at the unkempt look that surrounds this previously picturesque farmstead as we get close to our destination.  An agricultural “ghost-town” feeling creeps into my thoughts and I despise the capitalistic culprits who have reaped this farm’s final crop. No longer do cattle contentedly chew their cuds lying between the orderly but empty skeleton stanchions that line the bottom of the barn.

Now, only barn swallows that are normally considered good luck find homes on the weary timbers that once loftily protected its four-legged occupants and feathered friends from wind and rain, snow and scorching sun.  No longer do the fermented smells of silage, the warm fragrance of horses and cattle drift up through the overhead boards to the threshing floors, granary, and hay mows.  All is quiet except for the twittering swallows who chatter at the strangers who clamber across broken glass, through head-high weeds, and around abandoned remnants of a brighter day when farm life was flowing through every crevice and corner of this barn.

Signs of a larger winged inhabitant, a barn owl, lay scattered on the wide floor boards beneath the sturdy rafters upstairs.  No wise eyes stare down at our group as we study the wooden shingles that remain beneath the steel roof that has protected them from nature’s assaults for decades on end.  The owl, too, has abandoned this regal work of art, perhaps already realizing that something is amiss when crops no longer grace its second floor, and cows no longer await the farmer’s attention at dawn and dusk.  Not even a mouse skitters away at our approaching feet.  No familiar felines wait quietly to snare resident rodents in their claws.  The barn is far too silent.

Staring back at me from its perch on top of a wooden hay manger, a baby barn swallow is unaware that its safe haven will soon be gone.  No longer will its parents dart after dinner bugs flying over the barnyard or under the eaves.  Their aerial acrobatics will be transferred to another barn in the coming weeks.  When these swallows migrate back next spring in search of their mud nests piled snuggly atop forever-darkened light fixtures and rusty nails in this old barn, the only thing that will remain here of this old barn will be memories.  The rough-hewn logs spanning its length and breadth will be gone, replaced by steel and concrete.  Instead of a stately Pennsylvania barn, the landscape will offer passersby the sterile architecture of box warehouses as still another working farm bites the dust.  No longer needed, this old barn is getting in the way of economic development.

As part of the band of visitors, I am hoping the fate of this barn will be better than its partner standing on the adjacent farm that will also be converted to non-agrarian uses.  That barn will feel the wrecking ball shatter its sides and rock its foundation unless a salvager intervenes.  Then its lumber will be torn apart and scattered in hundreds of pieces as it is retrofitted to other uses.  But in the case of the neighboring historic barn, there is still hope that its timbers may stay intact as it draws advocates together in a united purpose. 

We hope the “barn swallow” good luck has not run out for this barn whose stories of generations of farm families filter through the dust as we walk over piles of corn fodder still covering its planks.  Built soon after the Civil War, this special five-bay barn has a possible afterlife if our efforts succeed.  While it will no longer grace the Berks County fields where it has stood sentry for more than a century, it may become a home for agricultural history and education as it is transformed into a farm museum.

Its walls will continue to tell the story of farmers and farm life from the past and present to strangers who walk through its wide and welcoming doors.  Instead of neighing and mooing, the sounds of children’s voices will filter through the walls and this old barn will find a purpose worthy of its past.  It’s a dream worth pursuing.

My passion for agriculture and old barns has spilled into creating a statewide organization for barn preservation called the Historic Barn and Farm Foundation of Pennsylvania.  We have been in the process of getting organized since March and have made great strides.  I am encouraged by the number of contacts I have received already from interested folks who care about barns.  I will be sharing news about the Foundation in future blogs.  In the meantime, why not share some of your barn stories with those of us who F-A-R-M.

Even though we can’t save all of our historic barns from uncaring scavengers and wrecking balls, we can perhaps keep a few more standing.  Working together, we can give it our best barn-saving try before these old treasures are merely fading photographs in a pile of archived memories.

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