(We took on an unusual construction project at Heritage Restorations to build a cheese cave for Brazos Valley Cheese, another one of our Homestead Craftsmen companies. The finishing touch was a castle-like entry door into the cave made from our antique barn wood.)

An underground cave for aging cheese is the dream of most cheese makers. And so it was for us at Brazos Valley Cheese located at the Brazos de Dios community in central Texas. During the more than fifteen years we have been making cheese, we have talked about building a cheese cave with an old-world flavor that we could age our artisan cheeses in. Finally, last year, we began work on a new shop and cave, but the cave part was the first to be built since more aging space was our immediate need.

Up to this time we have aged our twenty or so different varieties of hard and soft cheeses in walk-in coolers. Aging cheese in Texas can be a real challenge especially in the summer when daytime high temperatures typically peak over 100 degrees, sometimes for weeks on end. Unlike building a cave at a more northern latitude, our ground temperature never gets low enough through the year to allow for a cave without supplementary refrigeration. But still, the advantages of a cave, versus a walk-in cooler, led us to break ground in November 2010 on the new cave. Though we researched other cave designs, we were somewhat on uncharted territory in a climate this warm, and knew that we would have to pay careful attention to insulation.

We expected to encounter rock not far beneath the surface and sure enough, at three feet down, we hit fractured limestone, which was easily broken up excavated to a depth of fifteen feet. The cave is basically a cement slab floor with cement block walls and an arched poured-concrete roof. This entire room was encased in a coating of closed cell spray foam with a vapor barrier covering it, along with French drains at the base and then back-filled and landscaped over. The interior measures 6,000 cubic feet and the interior walls have a stucco finish. The pine shelves in the cave hold 3,000 ten-to-twelve pound wheels of hard cheese. Thankfully, the temperature stays a constant 50 degrees with a rather moderately worked 2 ton cooler unit. And that’s in the heat of a Texas summer.

The cave will be accessible by an elevator inside the shop, in which we can lower carts of cheese. We will also have a brass fireman’s pole alongside the elevator to allow for a quick descent to the cave, instead of a walk-around to the stairs! For the public we have an insulated observation window at the bottom of the stairs, accessed from the outside of the shop. We topped the whole project off with a five-inch-thick insulated castle like door with its own skeleton key and wrought iron hinges that never fail to amuse visitors.

While searching out barns for dismantling and restoration in the Albany, New York area, we have over the past four years come across what seems to be a unique and rare form of barn. The Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, later to become New York, was perhaps America’s first true ethnic melting pot, with a history of different groups immigrating to the colony from the time the Dutch first settled there in 1624. Unlike the English in New England, the Dutch were tolerant of many different ethnic and religious groups including French Huguenots, Palatine Germans, Sephardic Jews and Englishmen.

To this mix was added in the Albany area about 1780 a large contingent of Scots who settled to the west of Albany and Schenectady, New York in the Mohawk River Valley. Today this area comprises, not surprisingly, towns with names like New Scotland, Scotia, Perth, Pattersonville and Broadalbin. It was while searching for old barns in these towns that we first began to come across barns that differed from the typical Dutch and English barn framing that is so common in New York. What distinguishes these barns is that they have ridge beams supported by king posts. Otherwise, from the wall plates down, they have they resemble the framing of English barns.

The examples we have encountered all mostly scribe-ruled and marriage-marked and seem to date c 1780 on. There are a few variations in the way the rafters relate to the ridge beams: the rafter pairs are either mortised into the ridge beams or they are resting on top of them and joined by trunneled lap joints. The typical woods used are local hardwoods of beech and chestnut and the softwood, Eastern white pine. This also point to a pre-nineteenth century construction, before hemlock became the predominant building wood in the region. Roof pitches vary from 11/12 down to 9/12 and the ridge beams are square to pentagonal. Most all parts of the barns are hand-hewn with sawn braces being the exception.

Perhaps the grandest, largest and most unique example we encountered of what we call New World Scottish Barns was from Perth, New York with a footprint of 42 x 50 feet. From the outside, one would have thought he encountered a New World Dutch barn with its 11/12 pitched roof and nearly square dimensions. But the interior framing was an unusual mix of three king posts supporting a pentagonal ridge beam and queen posts supporting purlin plates, all in the same barn. The frame was predominantly beech and chestnut and scribe ruled with five bents.

Scotch Barn With Both King and Queen Post

It is my speculation that these barns are derived from the Scottish settlers to the area. It would be interesting to explore the later history of this barn form, if it moved west with the descendants of those first Scottish settlers into Western New York and Ohio the way the English frame did. But why they built this style of barn in the first place is not known, especially when one considers the difficulty of raising a ridge beam on king posts. Perhaps the Scots built barns this way because the English didn’t!

If anyone knows of any other examples of this type of king post barn in America or of the origin of these New York barns, we would like to hear from you.