Oct 23, 2012 3 min read

For the past two weeks or so, my husband has been working on dismantling an old barn. He had heard months ago that plans were in the works to extend a township road for gas well access, and the barn was to be bulldozed over to help make room. An entrepreneurial soul, he asked for permission to dismantle and remove the barn instead.His plan was to salvage the good wood beams and siding and use them to build a calving barn in our winter pasture. Regular readers of this column have already been regaled with tales of my ill-advised and inept attempts at helping our cows and calves during the muddy season, but suffice it to say that a warm, dry place for calves to be born would be beneficial to all involved.Once permission had been granted, he got to work. He and a laborer worked long days to first clean out the accumulation of junk that had been collected over the past decades and then begin to remove the wood siding. Piece by piece, the barn came apart. The roof was not salvageable, but the sides went into several piles. Some we could use, some for a friend’s replica outhouse project, others for wood workers and crafters that we know. Barns like this don’t come around too often, my husband said, so we shared.The siding and floor boards themselves told a story. In some cases, those planks were 24 inches wide, with a few that were nearly 30. Imagine the forest that those boards came out of! Not to mention, that they were hand-hewn. The craftsmanship that went into this type of building is astounding. Thinking about the barn-raising made the barn-razing bittersweet.Without the siding, the skeleton became visible, and so did more examples of quality building skills. The beams were definitely hand-cut, having chisel marks all over them. At all of the joints, holes had been drilled to allow for the wooden pins to be nailed into place. I was amazed at not only how well it had held up over the past hundred-plus years, but also how nice and relatively uniform it looked. Is beautiful the right word choice for describing an old barn?As the guys prepared to pull the building down, a man stopped to talk to them. He offered to buy the beams if they would remove them piece by piece so he could rebuild the barn on his property. My husband agreed. While it meant that we wouldn’t have quite all the necessary materials for our calving barn, it made us glad to know that the original barn would be reassembled and that the history of it would be preserved. Besides, what he paid us will nearly cover the cost of our materials, and even if we go another year or two without our building, it’s not a big deal. I can always use my stupidity to further fill this column.Laura Zoeller can be reached at zoeller5@hughes.net.