Monthly Archives: August 2012

LaRue Barn

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Kevin Durkin

We found the LaRue barn through a phone call from a woman in northern New Jersey who had heard about our work of moving and restoring barns. She wanted to know if we would possibly want to move an old barn that was in danger of being demolished to make way for a new suburban development.

At the time this was only our second barn to move, so we did not know entirely what we were getting into, except that we wanted to restore more barns. As it turned out, this unique barn was originally built about 1760 in the northern New Jersey town of Mahwah, close to the New York state border on Route 202, an old Colonial road that runs from Boston to Philadelphia, skirting to the west around New York City. It is what is known as an English framed barn, though the LaRue family who built it was of French Huguenot descent. The timbers are oak and chestnut, felled by ax from the surrounding virgin forest and hewed by hand. It was moved in 1876 to about a half mile from where we found it. Moving barns was a common occurrence, as they were meant to last for centuries and could be readily unpegged, disassembled and relocated to another farm.

Crooked Braces

As you look overhead you will see the unusual curved and dovetailed wind braces connecting the long overhead tie beams to the outside wall posts. These are called “crooked braces” because they were cut from the crook or curved limb of a tree. This feature is unusual to find in an American barn because there was so much good, straight wood available for building timbers that it was not necessary to use such curved pieces of wood. The use of such tree cruks indicates that the barn was probably built by a barn framer who learned his trade in Europe, where cruks were often used due to the shortage of straight timber.

A Role in the American Revolution

Early in its history, the LaRue barn played a role in the American Revolution. During the cold winter of 1780, General George Washington spent two days at the LaRue house, and undoubtedly Continental soldiers under General Washington spent nights in this barn. The soldiers would have been part of a Virginia regiment of “light horse” cavalry under the command of Colonel George Baylor, and were also known as Washington’s “Life Guard,” soldiers whose job it was to protect the commander-in-chief. They accompanied Washington wherever he traveled. It was not far from this barn in 1778, when temporarily detached from the main army, that Colonel Baylor’s men were sleeping in barns and massacred by a British surprise attack in the middle of the night. It was part of a deadly rivalry between the armies and included a young British officer and spy, Major John Andre, who was later hanged as Benedict Arnold’s accomplice in attempting to sell the important American fort of West Point to the British.

We can imagine the conversation of these soldiers about the war and their families as they settled down in the barn loft for the night. But one thought that definitely did not cross their minds was the fact that one day, over two hundred and twenty years later, some young men from a place called Texas would come to New Jersey and dismantle the barn they were sleeping in and move and rebuild it nearly two thousand miles away – much less that they would fly through the air to get there! We can also most likely claim that “George Washington’s horse slept here!”

We have placed the La Rue barn with a log cabin in a small homestead setting. They are a combination of homestead elements from different times and different places: a 1760 New Jersey barn, an 1830 Missouri cabin, an 1860 New York smokehouse, an 1890 New York silo and a 1930 Texas windmill. Yet somehow they all complement one another. If you can, visit on a late winter afternoon as the sunset casts a golden light across the fields and over the homestead.

Editorial Comment:

Barns like the La Rue were developed over centuries of sustainable, small scale farming. They were designed for diverse crops and livestock and could house all that a family living sustainably off the land needed: a place for chickens, draft animals, grain and hay storage overhead in the mow and even a place to thresh grain on the nave floor. This also means that with the coming of the industrial age, they were regarded as dinosaurs, not well-suited for modern agribusiness.

We have placed the LaRue barn next to our model homestead garden. A 10,000 gallon cistern stores rainwater harvested from the barn’s roof, for use in the garden and for livestock. We use the LaRue barn as a place to hold seminars, and plan to add climate control to it for year-round use.

Published in SustainLife Quarterly Journal of the Ploughshare Institute for Sustainable Culture (Spring 2012).

 

Colonel Drake Saves the Whales

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From time to time, in my travels in the Northeast, I pass through the sleepy hamlet of Greenville, New York—just another rural American village on the landscape of formerly thriving agricultural communities. Over the last eighty years, such communities have undergone a relentless depopulating, as generations of young people abandoned their agrarian roots and made their ways to urban centers that offered more “economic opportunity.” In our travels, we have all likely noted this scenario: boarded-up main streets with few businesses left, other than maybe a video store, tattoo parlor and a used comic book shop. The shops that once provided essential products and services have long departed, washed away by the rising tide of superstores that squat on the outskirts of town, often in what had previously been a productive hayfield. The only remarkable feature left to such towns is the nineteenth-century architecture, which in the case of Greenville includes several Greek Revival and Victorian masterpieces that now look shabby, with peeling paint and other signs of recession-induced neglect. You can also see an empty church or two. These have now passed into their afterlives as community centers or jazzercise establishments.

At the center of Greenville stands an unnoticed and unread cast-iron historical plaque (“placed by the authority of the Historical Commission of the State of New York, The Honorable Hugh L. Carey, Governor”) dedicated to Colonel Edwin L. Drake. Drake is the man who did more to save the whales than probably any other man ever did. His birthplace, this historical marker informs us, lies a mile or so to the north, which happens to be under what is now a supermarket parking lot.

Edwin Drake (who came to be known as “Colonel” Drake) was the Greenville local-boy-makes-good. In 1858, he migrated to the adjacent Quaker state town of Titusville, where he drilled the first commercial crude oil well. Drake’s first well was housed in a rather unusual building that bore little resemblance to a modern drilling rig, save for its obelisk-shaped wooden tower at one end. The title “Colonel” was added to Drake’s name by Drake and his business partners, in hopes of impressing the people of Titusville. This was an effort to overcome the local perception of Drake’s well-drilling operation as something of a joke, referred to as “Drake’s Folly.”1

Before learning about Drake, I didn’t associate Pennsylvania with the oil business. From what I had known, crude oil belonged more to the realm of states like Texas and Oklahoma. Actually, in those early days, Pennsylvania produced half of the world’s oil before the great oil boom in east Texas in 1901.2 Prior to Drake’s technological breakthrough in crude oil drilling and its subsequent refining into kerosene, early nineteenth-century lamplight came from homemade tallow candles and a steady flow of whale oil. This demanded that a substantial supply of whale pods be hunted down, harpooned and their blubber rendered into oil on the high seas. By drilling the first oil well, Drake saved the whales from their inevitable extinction at the hands of globe-trotting Yankee sea captains.

Yet, ironically, one of the direct descendants of Drake’s first oil well is the BP wellhead located one mile below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. As you probably know, last year, in the wake of an offshore oil rig explosion, this well spewed gobs of crude onto the shores of our southern Gulf states, causing an environmental disaster in the Gulf. This region had already been laboring under the burden of a 2,500 square mile dead zone, also induced by our dependence on oil, as the runoff of petroleum-based chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides drain down the Mississippi River from the once-fertile heartland of the Midwest.

Prior to Drake’s drilling of the first oil well, the world’s main source of fuel was wood. With the rise of industrialism and urbanism, entire regions and countries had been deforested, including all of England, and by 1860 much of New England. Along with domestic heating and cooking, steam engines and iron furnaces had a voracious appetite for wood. Firewood cutters and colliers traveled far and wide in their search for cordwood and charcoal.

When Drake tapped crude oil, he contributed greatly to the universal turn to economic dependence on the finite supply of nonrenewable fossil fuels, beginning with coal and oil, and then natural gas. Compared to renewable fuels like wood, fossil fuels have such concentrated energy that they build economies and nations quickly by saving enormous amounts of human labor. I recently heard that for every person in America, the energy we consume is equivalent to the labor of 100 people working for each one of us full-time! This potential did not elude the captains of the Industrial Revolution, who quickly tapped into this new and seemingly inexhaustible source of energy. Along with the refining of gasoline and diesel from crude oil came the internal combustion engine, superseding the wood-fired steam engine and becoming our largest consumer of fuels derived from crude oil. 3

Aside from the big fossil fuel guzzlers like automobiles, home heating, air conditioning, lighting and food production, today we are increasingly surrounded by and dependent on labor-saving electrical devices as the mark of civilization. I recently realized this late one evening when darkness had settled over our home and I could hear the lonely call of the whippoorwill outside my window. As I turned off the house lights, I looked around and noticed our home was aglow with little green and red lights! Lights on the computer, lights on the oven. Lights on the alarm clock. Lights on the telephone and refrigerator. Lights on the smoke detectors and battery charger. Gadgets everywhere, drinking up electricity night and day, whether in use or not.

We have come to rely on Drake’s crude oil as our cheapest and most available energy source. But considering the argument being made by more and more people today, that we are running out of and being drawn into political conflicts over this cheap source of energy, it seems that Drake let the petrol genie out of the energy bottle, and there does not yet seem to be an effective incentive or initiative to get it back in. And if there is any hope to reverse this trend at all and avoid what many predict is a looming global energy shortage and accompanying political crises, the cure may well have to arise on a grassroots, individual level.

The question is, what meaningful steps can we take as individuals and families to free ourselves from Drake’s unsustainable oil, which has so insinuated itself into our lives as to seem indispensable? We can start in little ways . . . from the ground up. Over thirty years ago, our community began such an exodus from the suburbs of New York City, with backyard, postage-stamp-size gardens, abiding by the premise that we should not “despise the day of small beginnings.”

Here are some simple beginning steps you might consider:

• Start a garden in your back (or front) yard, or secure a plot in a local community garden. Maybe you can even raise a surplus so you can then learn the art of food preservation, like canning and drying.

• Start a compost pile. (Confine this venture to your backyard.) You will be making the best free fertilizer for your garden.

• Learn to sew your own clothes and/or learn to knit.

• Learn to cook; get away from pre-packaged foods and eat simpler with local foods in season.

• Hang your laundry out to dry on a good old-fashioned clothesline and skip the clothes dryer. One of my friends who does this says that her family’s clothes actually last noticeably longer.

• Bake your own bread, “the staff of life,” and use whole grains so you can really lean on that staff. Few foods can rival the taste and satisfaction of fresh-baked bread.

• Take every opportunity to walk or ride a bicycle instead of driving your car.

And once you begin to put one foot in front of the other, don’t stop. When you’ve gained this ground, move on and seize more territory. Do you really need that dishwasher? I enjoy helping wash the dishes because it is an opportunity to talk with my daughters. If you have enough land, get a milk goat or small breed cow like a Jersey and make your own butter, yogurt and cheese. Be adventurous and get a few chickens for eggs and meat. And consider even bigger leaps, like starting a cottage industry.

In the process, you’ll be lifting yourself up from a sedentary, unsustainable life. You’ll no longer need that membership at the gym since you’ll be burning calories working in the garden, doing dishes, churning butter and pedaling your bicycle. The money you’ll save at the grocery store, gas pump and in gym membership dues will ease your credit card debt, while you and your family will feel invigorated and accomplished. And though you may not get a historical marker erected at the center of town in your name or save any endangered sea creatures, you and your family will be on the road to freedom and fulfillment as you provide for your own essentials . . . and you’ll have a whale of a time along the way!

 

1 “The Story of Oil in Pennsylvania,” Petroleum Education: History of Oil (Ithaca, NY.: The Paleontological Research Institution), http://www.priweb.org/ed/pgws/history/pennsylvania/pennsylvania2.html.

2 Ibid.

3 The steam engine is an external combustion engine in which the fuel is combusted to heat water in a boiler to make steam that is then channeled to a cylinder where it is released to expand and push a piston. The gasoline or diesel engine is an internal combustion engine where gasoline is combusted within the cylinder and pushes on a piston. Unlike most molecules that expand when heated and contract when frozen, water’s property to expand when heated and frozen is unique. If ice did not expand when frozen, it would be heavier than water . . . and therefore SINK, ultimately making the Earth uninhabitable. Whoever made ice to behave in such an unusual way knew what He was doing!

Middleburg Palatine House

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Kevin Durkin

Adjacent to the LaRue barn1 you will find another timber-framed building that is actually an early American house. It was originally built about 1750 in the Schoharie Valley of New York state on a hillside above the Schoharie Creek. The left half measures twenty feet by twenty feet and is the original old house. The timber-framed addition on the right side was added about 1800.

The Schoharie region was settled by a group of 530 German families who had come from London, England, to the Hudson Valley in the English colony of New York, beginning in 1710. They had first come to London from the Palatinate region of Germany to escape war and the harsh, cold winter of 1708—a year in which vineyards and livestock died in weather so cold that birds froze in midair. These settlers numbered about 2,800 and were the largest single group of immigrants to come to the colony of New York before the American Revolution.

They had been able to come to America because they had agreed to process naval stores from the sap of the eastern white pine trees. Naval stores like turpentine, varnish and tar were essential to the Royal Navy in the days of wooden ships. But the venture collapsed when the local eastern white pine trees failed to produce a suitable quantity of sap. The Palatine Germans were then released from their obligations, and they then settled throughout the Hudson, Mohawk and Schoharie valleys.

So the British government’s attempt to enlist these families to mass produce naval stores ended in abject failure. The Palatine Germans suffered greatly from this failure, along with other difficulties, and during the troubled time of their move from Germany to England to America, many hundreds of men, women and children died. Yet when given the opportunity to return to their sustainable, agrarian way of life, they not only survived, but succeeded and thrived. They went on to develop some of the most prosperous, productive farms in America, and by the time the Revolutionary War broke out in 1776, the Schoharie and Mohawk valleys were known for their abundant wheat production. This wheat helped to sustain the American Army under George Washington. When British forces and their Indian allies realized this, they raided the valleys in October of 1780, burning nearly 800 buildings. This Palatine house probably survived because it was built on a hillside above the valley. Yet, once again, after the war, these sturdy, resilient yeomen survived and returned to their farms from which they had been forced to flee. There they rebuilt and prospered.

 

1 See the Spring 2012 issue of the SustainLife Journal for an article on the LaRue barn.

Editorial Comment:

The Middleburg Palatine House is situated next to the LaRue barn, near our model homestead garden. We use the lower story for classes to teach gardening, agricultural and other related subjects and for audio-visual presentations. We make use of the upper story for office space.

Published in SustainLife Quarterly Journal of the Ploughshare Institute for Sustainable Culture (Summer 2012).