heritage-restorations

The Glen Barn

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 01:01:41 GMT

Built c. 1870, the Glen barn is one of the largest barns ever built in New York State measuring forty feet wide by one hundred feet long. Heritage Restorations has restored over 200 barns from New York, and it is the largest barn that they have ever moved and rebuilt. The history of the Glen barn is a reflection of the great cultural changes that took place during the 1800’s in America. The town of Glen is located in the Mohawk Valley of New York, a historic region that in the 1700’s witnessed many of the major battles of the French and Indian War and Revolutionary War. Barns built at the time of the Revolution were typically under 1,000 square feet, measuring 26 feet wide by 36 feet long. But with the coming of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800’s, barn sizes grew larger and larger as improved machines for harvesting grain and hay were invented. This process reached its peak about 1870 when the largest wooden barns ever built, like the Glen Barn, were erected with eight times the volume of those earlier barns.

The Glen Barn is also unique for its method of construction and length of its timbers. The process used to build the barn is called “timber framing”, an ancient method of building that uses hand-cut mortise and tenon joints to hold the framework of the barn together without any metal fasteners, as opposed to the modern steel fasteners used today. The Glen Barn has massive timbers up to forty feet long that span its full width. The species of wood used in the framing is also unique. It is Hemlock wood, a conifer that was once a dominant species of tree in the American forest, but was decimated by loggers in the 1800’s. Surprisingly, hemlock trees were not cut for their lumber, but rather for their bark, which is high in tannic acid. This acid was used in the tanning process by which raw hides were turned into fine leather for boots, shoes and all types of leather goods. The loggers at that time would clear-cut the hemlock forests of the Northeast and only peal the bark off the felled hemlock trees, leaving behind masses of pealed logs. A prosperous tanning industry grew up in the region and shipped its finished leather goods around the world. An after-effect of this logging was that farmers had a free supply of ready-cleared land and long, virgin timbers with which to build their enormous barns.

This occurred just at the time when this region of New York became the gateway to the American Midwest with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which passed just a few miles from the Glen Barn and linked the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. This improved transportation provided by the canal allowed goods and farm produce, especially grains like corn and wheat, to be transported economically for the first time from the rich Midwest farms to the East Coast port of New York City and from there around the world. Prior to the opening of the canal, it cost 80 cents per bushel to ship corn to the East. In the year after the canal opened, this price dropped to 5 cents. This Transportation Revolution led farmers, who had previously grown a diversity of crops, to instead begin to specialize with single crops. The Glen Barn was built about 1870 in response to this market change. It was designed and built as a hay and dairy barn to provide milk products like cheese to a distant market. After over a century of service, the Glen Barn came to stand idle as those market changes, which once made it an innovative barn for its day, now moved on to make it obsolete. Modern dairies now house their cows in low metal buildings that cannot compare in craftsmanship or grandeur to the all-wooden Glen Barn. This year, the craftsmen of Heritage Restorations, based in Waco, Texas, carefully dismantled the Glen Barn, shipped it to Texas where it was cleaned and restored, and re-erected it in Kendalia, where it has now begun its second life far from the Mohawk Valley, but appreciated just as much as those earlier settlers did who built it nearly one hundred and fifty years ago.

The Barn Melting Pot

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 00:46:38 GMT

I am often asked the question of where we get our barns. When I reply, “Mostly from New York,” I am then asked, aren’t there good barns in other states?

To answer this question takes a history lesson. First, there are proportionately few barns in the western United States that are timber-framed. This is because the Westward movement in the U.S. coincided with the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the 1800’s. As America industrialized and sawmills took the place of hand-hewing in the building of timber frames, there were fewer and fewer handcrafted, heavy timber frames built as settlers moved west. So the largest concentration of good, old timber frames is in the east. And since the warm climate of the south was not conducive to long life in wooden farm buildings, and the warmer southern winters did not require farmers to necessarily have large barns, this left the biggest and best East Coast barns in the northeast.

And the northeast had its divisions, too. Let’s include in this region the New England states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont (originally known as the “Hampshire Grants”). Also in the northeast are the Middle Atlantic States: New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland. Below this are the southern states beginning with Virginia (though some would argue that the south begins with the Mason-Dixon line and therefore part of New Jersey is in the south, too, and Cape May, New Jersey, is south of Alexandria, Virginia!).

Moving back north again: Barns in the New England states are just that— English, with few exceptions. New England was settled by Englishmen who early on excluded foreigners from their colonies and even shunned other Englishmen who did not conform to their Puritan beliefs, like the Quakers, who, under William Penn, settled Pennsylvania, and the Catholics who settled Maryland.

Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and West Jersey were also largely settled by Englishmen, with a smattering of Germans. This leaves the colonies of East Jersey and New York, where we get most of our barns. This region was settled in the 1620’s, not by the English but by the Dutch. And the Dutch allowed many nationalities to immigrate to what they then named “New Netherlands.” Aside from Dutch there were French Huguenots, Swedes, Jews, Walloons, Scots, Germans and others. And many brought their different timber-framing traditions to the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys and northern New Jersey (known in colonial times as “East Jersey”).

Combine this old world timber-framing talent with the virgin forest of this region, and you have the grandest barns ever built. And that’s where our barns come from.

Old World Meets New

hannah@heritagebarns.com (Hannah McAlister) — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 00:42:11 GMT

More than any other factor, what differentiated American timber framing from its predecessors in the Old World was when the Old World pioneers came to America, they were confronted with a very different building reality in that the materials they had on hand to build with, namely trees, were vastly different from their experience in Europe. By the 1600’s many European countries like England, Ireland and Holland had been deforested. And though there was a tradition of timber framing, they had by this time, very poor quality trees to work with. For this reason they employed even the short and unstable crooks of trees in their buildings, a practice that became unnecessary in the New World.

Where had all the mighty English oaks gone to create this shortage of timber? Literally, up in smoke. This was before the age of coal-burning and wood was used for heating and cooking, as well as home building and wooden shipbuilding.

In our years of restoring historic timber framed barns, this hand hewn hemlock timber is the largest we have ever seen. It is part of a barn built in the Mohawk Valley of New York state circa 1840. The timber is 35 feet long and measures 13″ thick by 28″ at the widest point. That’s well over 900 board feet of lumber in a single beam.

After over 165 years of natural air drying, this beam weighs around a ton. When it was first cut green using only simple hand tools and transported with horses, it likely weighed over 3500 pounds!

Counting the tightly spaced growth rings, we determined that the tree from which this timber was hewn was around 300 years old when the early American farmer cut it to build his barn. It was a towering 100-year-old hemlock when the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth harbor in 1620.

Through THeir Eyes

Can you imagine the awe these settlers to the New World felt when they arrived and saw the virgin American forest? They were probably stunned . . . and intimidated. The New World forest contained straight trees over one hundred feet tall: pines, hemlocks, oaks, chestnut (which was said to have made up one third of the northern forest), maples and beech, just to mention a few of the species. And sometimes this difference between New and Old World trees had deadly consequences. The first permanent settler to Bergen County in Northern New Jersey in 1670,

David Demarest, lost his namesake and oldest son to a falling tree soon after they arrived. The Demarests had immigrated first to New York from the low country of Holland and prior to that were persecuted Huguenots in France. They had probably never encountered a forest when they began to build their homes and barns on the bank of the Hackensack River.

So here in America converged a unique combination: skilled European wood craftsmen and an untouched, virgin forest. And when the two were combined, they produced for a period of time, the finest and largest barns ever built in the world, during what we might call the “Golden Age of Barns,” before the Eastern forest was clear cut to make way for agriculture and industry, and the Industrial Revolution brought an end to the art of timber framing in America.

A Heritage Barn Story

hannah@heritagebarns.com (Hannah McAlister) — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 00:38:04 GMT

In the fall of 1609, English explorer Henry Hudson sailed up the river that would later bear his name. He was in search of a westward passage to Asia, but as the water sweetened and became less salty, it became clear to them that this was not the passage they were seeking. It was fine land though, and he claimed it for his patrons, The Dutch West India Company.

In 1624, the Dutch returned to the valley and began two settlements, one at the mouth of the river, which they called New Amsterdam, and the other at the furthest north reach that Hudson sailed to, which they called Fort Orange.

Not only did these settlers find a rich and fertile land, they found forests with enormous trees of hard, dense, tight ringed wood that had never felt the bite of the iron axe. And not only did these giants of the forest serve them well in their own buildings, but their lumber was prized in European countries that had long been settled and deforested.

To tame this wilderness and fell these trees was a challenge that at times proved fatal to these inexperienced settlers. David Demarest, the first settler to cross the Hudson from New Amsterdam into what is now Northern New Jersey was tragically killed when felling one of these massive trees for his family’s new home.

But the challenge proved rewarding despite the dangers. Felling and hand hewing timbers from this virgin forest, the first settlers built barns and homes unlike any they were able to build in Europe. Instead of piecing short timbers together, they could hew straight beams forty, fifty and even seventy feet long.

Not long after these first Dutch settlers arrived, the political wars of Europe spilled over to the New World and in 1664 the Dutch were forced to cede their colony to the English as a spoil of the Thirty Years War that had been fought on the European continent. The result being that the Dutch settlements of New Amsterdam and Fort Orange were renamed proper English names: New York and Albany.

The English also recognized not only the beauty of their new colony, but also the natural riches, especially the trees, of which they had a particular need. The Royal Navy was in desperate need of not only timbers for their ships, but also of Naval Stores such as varnish, tar, pitch and turpentine. They hoped these resources could be gotten from the massive Eastern White pine trees of the region. To help accomplish this, the English turned to their allies, the Germans, who provided 5000 settlers from the Palatine region and sent them over to the New World in 1710. The experiment would soon fail however, when the English realized that the Eastern White Pines did not produce a sap satisfactory for making naval stores, at which time they released the Palatine Germans to settle in the colony wherever they could. They pushed westward up the Mohawk River where they came to yet another river, which they named the Schoharie. It too was a fertile valley surrounded by high mountains.

It was here that Hartman Winedecker brought his family and built his home in 1713. Though he brought with him the customs of Germany, he chose to build his barn like those of the Dutch settlers in the region. Unlike the English barns, the architectural style of these barns dated back to the eleventh century.

All was well for the Winedeckers for their first fifty years on the frontier. This new land was good to them, and their massive-framed barn held all that the family needed, including abundant wheat harvests…

that is until another political dispute broke out, this time between the English and their colonists in America. Soon a full-blown Revolution was raging in the thirteen English colonies and the wheat of the Schoharie Valley was a valuable asset to the American troops under General George Washington.

Then in October of 1780, just when the harvest had been gathered into the barns, the British and Indian allies under the notorious Indian leader Joseph Brandt struck the Schoharie Valley.

These raiders spared nothing in their attempt to cut off the grain supply to Washington’s continental army. Six hundred homes, barns and outbuildings fell to their torches…except the barn of Hartman Winedecker’s. Somehow it was overlooked or bypassed. It would not only survive the American Revolution, but it would see the Revolutionary soldiers it sheltered live on to found a new nation. The Valley grew as new settlers came and Indian raids ceased. The opening of the Erie Canal in the 1820′s would transport grain stored in Winedeckers nearby barn as well as hundreds of thousands of pioneers heading westward via the Canal to the Great Lakes of the Midwest.

Civil War with its Southern brothers sundered the nation, followed over the next nearly century and half by seven more foreign conflicts.

Ultimately it saw use for another two centuries after the American Revolution until another Revolution finally caught up with it: The Industrial Revolution. In the 1970’s it fell victim to new mechanized improvements in agriculture, and its subsequent years of obsolescence neglect were more wearing on it than two and a half centuries of daily use.

By the year 2007, it was in need of a new lease on life. And that is when Heritage Restorations arrived to carefully dismantle and restore it to its original glory. Now this survivor of centuries and wars lives on, appreciated everyday by its new owners for its simply hand-crafted beauty and incredible history.

Hand Crafted Water Wheel

hannah@heritagebarns.com (Hannah McAlister) — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 00:35:06 GMT

In late 2012 a private golf course near Houston, Texas was in the process of a facility expansion including a new 9 hole-par three surrounding a small lake. The Owner, a creative visionary, imagined this required industrial pump-house building could be a feature rather than a distraction to the otherwise pristine short course.

The pump-house became known as the Gristmill and the Heritage Restorations design team began to design a stone Gristmill that would fit the surrounding landscape and allow room for the fertigation system and equipment. A proper Gristmill needs a water wheel, so from the very inception of the Gristmill a water wheel was the key exterior feature to the building. To complete the authentic a feel of the whole campus a creek was designed and constructed to provide a water flow capable of turning the water wheel.

A dovetail for each of the 50 paddles is cut into the top face of the rim. The 14″ x 36″ paddles are also glued from 3 to 4 individual boards and mirror the negative dovetail cut in the rim with the positive counterpart on each end.

The second rim is glued in the same method as the first and the paddles slide between the two rims each locking into place with a 1.5″ extension beyond the exterior rim wall. The extension helps reduce the rim drag in the water making the wheel as efficient as possible with a given water flow.

20 spokes are constructed, 10 for each side, and intentionally appear to interact with the 12 visible dovetails at random intervals so to not draw too much attention to the rim connection design and details. The spokes tapered toward the middle and fastened to a custom fabricated steel hub behind a machined brass compression plate with 60 carriage bolts and square nuts. The assembly slides over a 6″ diameter steel axle and balances with 16 3/4″ set screws used for truing an fine adjustment.

The final result is a 5,000 lbs 19′ sinker cyprus under-shot water wheel turning at just under 4 rpms with 2,800 GPM of water flowing through a 42″ wide rock shoot providing serene views from what has been consistently rated, the number 1 golf course in Texas.

Barn Raising in Japan

hannah@heritagebarns.com (Hannah McAlister) — Thu, 02 Feb 2023 00:30:22 GMT

Heritage Restorations had the unique opportunity to raise one of our restored historic timber frames in Japan!

We dismantled and restored an 1840’s timber frame barn from the tranquil fields of upstate New York and reerected it in the bustling metropolis of Tokyo, Japan.

For the first leg of its journey, the barn was transported 2000 miles by truck to our shop in Waco, Texas. The entire frame was completely cleaned, restored, and fumigated. It was then loaded into two overseas shipping containers for the trip to Japan.

From Waco, the containers were sent by truck and loaded on a freight train for the 1500 mile trip to Los Angeles. In the port of Los Angeles, the barn was loaded onto a huge overseas barge for the 5500 mile, three week trip to Japan.

Once unloaded in Japan, the barn was loaded for the last time on a truck and delivered to its new home in Tokyo.

Four men from Heritage Restorations made the 17 hour flight to Tokyo to direct the barn raising. Working alongside our new found Japanese friends, the barn was reerected in a single day.

As craftsmen have done for centuries after completing a well crafted piece of work, everyone signed their names on the barns large swing beam.

If you could travel back in time and attempt to explain to the early American farmer who built this barn that in 150 years the barn would be transported from the little hamlet of Glen, New York to Waco, Texas, to Los Angeles, California and half way around the world to be raised in Japan, he’d have thought you were off your rocker! You could then tell him that the men who did the work flew through the air across the ocean to do it!

The completed barn is now used as a community center, and will be used as a model to show to other prospective Japanese customers who may also want …a piece of American History in the Far East.

The Great Epizootic of 1872

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 01:13:34 GMT

An Example of Large-scale Vulnerability from the Past

People often ask what interesting things we find in the centuries-old barns we dismantle for our barn restoration business. Well, there are a lot of interesting “things,” like the time we found an old pillowcase hidden in a corner of the first barn that we took down that was full of jewelry from a long-forgotten house burglary, and the time we found the bowling ball that my helper claims is the ball that old Rip Van Winkle used before he drank the potion that put him to sleep for twenty years in the Catskill Mountains. And there are also occasionally some very interesting writings, most often in the form of centuries-old graffiti. About 1870, a black ink feed sack marker came into use that seems to have found its way into the hands of just about every boy and hired hand in that era. For the next twenty years they made it their off-hours pastime to write their names, dates and musings on barn interiors. Unlike the modern railway boxcar graffiti that we are all subject to while waiting for freight trains to pass through town, this barn graffiti was often scrolled in the most eloquent of nineteenth century scripts.

We recently found perhaps one of the more intriguing examples of such writing in a barn from the Mohawk Valley of New York. It read simply:

“Equine flu epidemic, October 10, 1872”

This example tweaked my curiosity, as I thought that if this was a significant enough epidemic to make note of on a barn wall, it might have made its way into the history books. So I did some speedy research and found that the 1872 horse influenza epidemic was indeed historic. But what I found most interesting is that this catastrophic event remains forgotten and entirely unknown to most of us today, probably because horses play such an insignificant role in our modern lives, unless, of course, you—like us—still depend on them for plowing and cultivating the fields which produce your food.

Horse flu is formally known as equine influenza. When a disease that affects animals reaches widespread proportions, it is known not as an “epidemic,” but an “epizootic.” Equine influenza is a highly contagious virus occurring globally that has been known to infect up to 100% of exposed horses, though there is now an effective vaccination for it. Unlike swine flu or avian flu, it has not spread to humans in the past, though it did have tremendous effects on people who at that time depended completely on horses for transportation, delivery of their food and firefighting.

Beginning in Toronto, Canada, in the late summer of 1872, in only three days the disease hit nearly all the livery stables and the horses used to pull streetcars in that city. By mid-October, horses in all of Canada, Michigan and the New England states were infected. By the beginning of November the disease had spread to Illinois, Ohio and South Carolina. By the end of the month, Florida and Louisiana reported cases.

The epizootic spread across America from New England to California in only ninety days, and as far south as Havana, Cuba. It became known as the “The Great Epizootic of 1872.” Nearly 100% of horses in its path were infected, and between one and ten percent died. Most infected horses could not stand up, and when they could stand, they coughed violently. The disease rendered them unable to do any work, carry riders or pull wagons and carriages. All commerce ground to a halt as the most widespread and devastating equine flu epizootic in history took both Canada and the United States by surprise.

The coal needed to fuel locomotives could not be delivered. “The outbreak forced men to pull wagons by hand, while trains and ships full of cargo sat unloaded, tram cars stood idle and deliveries of basic community essentials were no longer being made.” The epizootic contributed to the financial panic of 1873, and it even affected the war in the West with the Apache Indians, where neither the Apaches nor the US calvary could use their horses and resorted to fighting on foot.

In November of 1872, a great fire broke out in Boston that destroyed 776 buildings across 65 acres of the city. Because of the epizootic, horses were unfit to pull the fire engines, hose reels and other fire equipment, so crews of men were organized to pull the heavy fire equipment on foot.

Newspaper headlines of the day reflected the widespread panic: “Alarming Effect upon the People, Total Suspension of Travel, Disappearance of Wagons.” In October 1872, the New York Times reported:

"There is hardly a public stable in the city which is not affected, while the majority of the valuable horses owned by individuals are for the time being useless to their owners. It is not uncommon along the streets of the city to see horses dragging along with drooping heads and at intervals coughing violently."

A few days later the Times reported:

"Large quantities of freight are accumulating along the Erie Railway in Paterson, New Jersey. The disease is spreading rapidly in Bangor, Maine. All fire department horses in Providence, Rhode Island, are sick."

Everyday conveniences that had been taken for granted disappeared.

That a horse disease could cause such a nationwide catastrophe and contribute to a financial panic and prolonged financial downturn might be difficult for us to imagine. The Equine Flu epizootic of 1872 almost seems like a quaint, forgotten, historical footnote on how much things have changed, including our once-total reliance on draft animals. But this historical footnote begs an obvious question: Though we do not rely on horses today, have we become even more dependent on other forms of transportation that are totally dependent on a vulnerable fuel supply? Some people may be confident that our modern, global system is more resilient and robust than the draft animal–dependent system of the nineteenth century. But our modern system is much more fragile due to its ubiquitous dependence on one source of fuel that is almost completely out of our ultimate control, with 80 percent of our transportation fuel being imported.

From its very beginning, the Transportation Revolution of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries went hand in hand with the Industrial Revolution to completely reshape our economy and lifestyle, especially in the way food was supplied. This revolution began with the age of canals in the 1820’s, which radically lowered shipping prices. The age of canals was followed by the age of rail, which gave way to the age of highways after World War II. And now the Transportation Revolution continues with global shipping on container ships and dependence on oil tankers. In a previous issue we reported that the average American meal travels 1500 miles to the consumer, and many states grow as little as 15 percent of their food.

If the modern equivalent of the equine influenza epizootic were to strike, we are actually in a far more vulnerable place today than the America of 1872, which was still a largely agrarian economy with a rural population for which most food sources were local and therefore insulated from such a disaster.

CuChullaine O’Reilly, of The Long Riders Guild Academic Foundation, an organization which did a three-year research project on the equine influenza epizootic, concluded:

"Imagine a transportation disaster that within 90 days affected every aspect of American transportation, everything Americans took [for] granted, everything that ensured their safety, every city, town and village where they lived and left everything in its path under siege."

At the height of the equine flu epizootic, in November 1872, a writer for the New York Times wrote:

"What will be the effect of even a temporary withdrawal of the horsepower from the nation is a serious question to contemplate. Coal cannot be hauled from the mines to run locomotives, farmers cannot market their produce, boats cannot reach their destination on the canals"

Perhaps today, as the New York Times writer suggested one hundred and forty years ago from a greatly more self-sufficient and sustainable world, we also should seriously contemplate what we take for granted, and take the steps needed to provide sustainable resources for ourselves, our families and our communities.

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

Mott Gristmill

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 01:07:41 GMT

There is something about gristmills and waterwheels that resonates with just about everyone. The gristmill is an American icon that evokes sentiments of home and community, as is evidenced in the gristmill pictures so many of us have in our homes. Perhaps some of this sentiment was at the heart of our efforts in 1999 to relocate a historic working gristmill to our community in Texas. At the time we had an electric-powered mill running in a small outbuilding, but we wanted an authentic waterwheel-driven mill where we could grind the grains we grew into flour for both our families and our neighbors. So, the search was on, and it took us once again back to the East Coast where we tracked down an old, dilapidated gristmill in the town of Califon, New Jersey.

This area of New Jersey is not only noted for its rural beauty (New Jersey is, after all, “The Garden State”), it was also the scene of some of the most dramatic events in the American Revolution, events that, as we’ll see, were directly related to the Mott mill. When I first visited the mill, I was told that it dated to about 1820. But on closer examination we found that it was actually a much earlier gristmill that had been altered, as were many other mills during the transformative years of the early Industrial Revolution. We determined that the mill had been lengthened twelve feet and the roof raised a story. In October of 2000, we carefully dismantled the mill and shipped it to Texas. After moving the mill and re-erecting it on The Ploughshare campus as the Homestead Gristmill, we began to gather more information about its history. A land deed from 1768 is the earliest written record of this mill. The deed records: “Beginning at a large white oak marked for a corner standing near a small swamp on the southwest side of the brook below the mill . . . .” The deed was written when a German immigrant named Asher Mott decided to sell his share of the family property to his older brothers, John and Gershom for £ 1,000.

Further research revealed that John Mott was a patriot of some note. Living and running his gristmill in the Long Valley of west central New Jersey, he adhered to the patriot cause, and when the American Revolution broke out in 1775, he enlisted as a captain in the local militia. New Jersey is known as the “crossroads of the American Revolution,” as both armies traversed it several times.

In 1776 things did not fare well for General Washington and his army. He had been consistently outgeneraled and defeated by his adversaries, British generals Howe and Cornwallis, at the battles of Long Island, Manhattan, White Plains and Fort Washington. At Fort Washington he had watched from across the Hudson River as British troops surrounded his namesake fort on upper Manhattan and forced it to capitulate, sending all 4,000 defenders to prisons. As if this were not enough, the next week he was surprised by Cornwallis, who skillfully executed a night march and nearly succeeded in surrounding and destroying his ragged army.

In their haste to escape, Washington’s men left their breakfasts boiling in kettles over campfires for the British troops to enjoy. Through a cold rain, Washington’s army retreated down the length of New Jersey to the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. By that time the army had dwindled to not many more than 1,000 tired, discouraged, hungry, ragged men. Cornwallis, leisurely pursuing Washington to the Delaware River bank, dismissed Washington and his rabble with the comment that he would “bag the fox in the morning.” Five years later, of course, “that fox” “bagged” Cornwallis at Yorktown, ending the American Revolution with this British defeat.

But at that point in 1776, Washington’s back was up against a wall, and he knew that he had to have a turn of events or all would be lost. So, taking a gamble, he planned a surprise attack on Cornwallis’s outpost across the Delaware River at Trenton, New Jersey. But to get across the river and through the countryside back roads at night required a knowledgeable, local guide.

This is where Captain John Mott came forward. On the night of December 25, 1776, counting on the enemy being off guard after their holiday celebrations, Washington led his scraggly army—guided by Captain Mott—across the ice-flow-choked Delaware to capture the post at Trenton. They endured a grueling river crossing, a night march, a battle pitched at sunrise and a countermarch back across the river. Most of this time they were pelted by snow and sleet as they marched through a snowstorm in which many of the men did not have shoes, and the rags they wrapped around their swollen feet were soaked through with blood.

A week after the Battle of Trenton they again crossed the river to fight the Battle of Princeton, after which Washington led his army into winter camp at Jockey Hollow in Morristown, New Jersey, not far from Captain Mott’s gristmill. The mill undoubtedly served as a source for their flour for the rest of the war, including the winter encampments at both Valley Forge and Jockey Hollow. If you have ever visited New Jersey in the winter, you know that it is not the season for a camp out. The winter weather can be severe, ranging from cold rain to deep snow and often a combination of both on the same day. One can imagine the winter conversations that went on in the mill as they ground corn and wheat into flour, while debating which side would prevail in the conflict.

After the Revolution, John Mott went on to grind grain for the local community, and the mill passed through several hands during the 1800’s. It finally closed about 1920 when the post–World War I recession and competition from larger mills made it obsolete. Today, most all of the flour milled in America comes from five huge mills that use a steel hammer milling process that actually smashes the kernels.* Stone grinding has gone by the wayside, except at mills like our Homestead Gristmill where you can still get fresh, stone-ground flours.

Published in SustainLife Quarterly Journal (Fall 2012)

Colonel Drake Saves the Whales

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 00:18:48 GMT

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!

LaRue Barn

Sat, 25 Aug 2012 00:05:18 GMT

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 (Spring 2012)

Middleburg Palatine House

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 23:58:45 GMT

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 (Summer 2012)

Anatomy Of A Barn Treasure

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 01:31:32 GMT

One of the side benefits to working with old barns is that they were often the repositories of old things. Interesting old things. This series of articles is on the old things that we come up with in our barn work.

Take this old box for example. More properly, I should call it a chest. Being in a barn, I would have thought at first glance that it was an old tool chest. But let’s look more closely, and maybe we can do some detective work together and possibly find out what kind of life it led before winding up discarded in an old barn. Let’s look at the outside first before we venture inside.

The first thing we notice is the paint. It’s now faded and muddied, but at one time it was a pretty powder green, not the kind of color a workman might paint his toolbox. Next we see that the top and all the sides and bottom are single-width boards, not two or more boards glued together.

Their tight grain indicates they were cut from virgin pine trees growing before the first settlers arrived. Is it an old box perhaps from the late 1700’s!? Next we notice that the hinges have been moved. They were originally mortised into the top and back boards.

Opening up the lid, we see the reason why. The old screw holes are wallowed out from use, and when we take the old iron hinges off, they still don’t match the original holes. This is a good sign in a way, because these steel hinges are not old. They date to only the early 1900’s. This box would have had hand-forged hinges if it was as old as I think it is.

Looking around the top edge of the box lid, we see that the lid does not cover the box completely. It comes up short of the sides. Looking closer we also see some unusual round holes with rings around them. It seems that they were made by brass tacks with round heads that held fabric or leather on the top of the box, probably a stuffed cushion so a person could sit on the box, and this stuffing would bring the size of the top out to meet the edges of the sides.

Now a closer look at the inside to see what secrets it will reveal: It’s lined with a faded pink fabric. But the fabric is tacked in place and overlies the original hinge mortises, therefore it is not original, but a clue just the same to the mystery use of this box. And there is a box with a lid on it built into the end of the chest. Its lid pivots on two wood pins that are extensions of the little box lid itself, indicating that this box had to be in place when the chest was first assembled.

It is original, indicating this is a more delicate chest than a man’s tool chest. And it does not show the signs of wear like you would expect from a tool chest. Its use all along was more delicate. And there is another small box in the bottom of the chest, unattached. But when we pull back the fabric from the sides of the chest, it reveals two cleats on the side that this other small box neatly fits into and slides on.There you have it. Two small boxes in a chest. Both original. And, there is something else here. A number”2″ written on the side of the second box. It is written in a red marker common to the 1830’s. We see this kind of marker used by carpenters in barns from that period, and it seems to be original to this box!

Back to the outside for some more clues.Turning the box over, there are four steel rolling casters, one attached to each corner of the bottom. But as you can see from the photo, they are not mortised into the bottom. I surmise they are a later addition, as they have ball bearings, and the craftsmanship does not measure up to the original maker’s dovetails. So what kind of base did this chest have, or did it just sit on the floor? Let’s look at the outside base edges. Here we see the ghost of a missing board that once was attached around the base of the chest. The green paint ends at the line where this base board was attached. Then turning the chest back over again, we get two more clues to the chest’s use: A safety pin and an early, mother-of-pearl button fall out of the chest! So, our old chest wasn’t a tool chest after all. It was a sewing chest kept in the house. During long winter days it saw much use, until one day, it finally wound up out in the barn, empty and forgotten until . . . .

The Joinery Trade

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 23:52:17 GMT

We just completed another timber framing class here at Ploughshare in which we built a new timber frame of a 24 x 24 building.

This is a three-day class that has bit off more than it can chew in three days and which we need to expand to at least five days. The class calls for a lot of hand joinery, that is, hand-chiseling and sawing. What all of us notice in this class is how sore everyone is after a day of this kind of work, so the conversation inevitably evolves to comments about how strong those early timber framers were and, even further, what kind of people they were.

Who Were They?

In answer to these questions, we know that timber framing was not for the weak of heart or muscle, probably reflective of the trade of house stick framing today in which it is rare to find an old man or a weak young man. Before the age of mechanization, (i.e. saw mills) there were no short cuts, and it appears from the quality of the timber frames extant from this pre-industrial time, care and quality ruled. The mentality prevailed that if you were going to do it, you may as well do it right, and this adage equated to longevity.

The question is often asked, “Who were these men?” and “Did the farmers build entire frames themselves?” I will offer an answer to this question based on my experience and knowledge, but open to whatever anyone else may venture. Prior to the industrial age (c. 1800) and the heavy settlement of the original colonies in America, we were a country of 98% yeoman farmers. Considering all the other trades, this did not leave much room for a large pool of free-lance timber joiners. And I think that most timber frames, which included all types of buildings, were built by the local farmers for their own farms, perhaps with help from their more experienced neighbors. (This was also supplemented by slave labor both north and south, remembering that northern states not only had slavery, but in some cases more slaves, as in the case of New Jersey, than many southern states.)

The art of joinery was, out of necessity, known and practiced by most farmers. It took just a few tools: axe, saw, auger, string line, knife, or some sharp metal object, sharpening stone, mallet and chisel. An adze and slick would also have been helpful. And some of these could have been borrowed from a relative or neighbor. So, it was these farmers who built their own timber frames . . . with some neighborly help. Perhaps this is evidenced in the wide variety of sizes of barns and homes and how no two are identical. This may come as a surprise to us moderns, but only because we have lost so much of our “handy-ness” and common sense, that was in such abundant supply with our ancestors.

But with the advent of the industrial age came its hand-maiden: specialization, something that was first more common in Europe. With industrialism, all trades began to exit the home and splinter into specialists. The cloth making art fragmented into spinners, weavers, fullers and dyers. And with time, husbandry abandoned its diverse roots and farmers specialized their crops and livestock: dairy men, orchard men, grain. Mono culture was ultimately approaching on the horizon. And the art of timber framing specialized into the joiner’s trade.

The way the business evolved, would probably be similar to what we have today when a homeowner contacts a carpenter to remodel his home. A farmer would seek out a joiner, whose reputation in a localized society would probably already be well-known to him. And they would strike a deal. Very often, the farmer would fell the timber from his woodlot and sled them down to the building site in the winter. He may also take the timber frame building process to the point of hewing the timbers square, leaving the joiner to cut them to length and fashion all the joints. The joiners also had apprentices, sons or helpers who accompanied them. But always the master joiner called the shots. The successful outcome of the frame was solely his responsibility.

Not All Barns Are Created Equal

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 23:48:47 GMT

One of the questions I am asked most frequently is: “How can you tell a good barn from a bad barn?” My answer to this question is that you must look at each barn carefully with an eye to a combination of history, craftsmanship and plain ole wear-and-tear, and you must have a trained eye to do it.

In our work we have looked at hundreds of barns over the years and have found that there are good barns and there are bad barns. There are barns surviving today from the age of hand-craftsmanship and there are barns that are products of the Industrial Revolution, during which time the methods of building barns shifted from quality hand-craftsmanship, meant to last centuries, to what we have come to identify as the planned obsolescence of the industrial era of the last two hundred years or so.

When barns were timber-framed in America during the 1600s and 1700s, they were intended to last for centuries. This means that the owners wanted a heavy timber frame protected from the elements by the roof and siding. Even though they knew the roof and siding would wear out and be replaced many times, and even the flooring would be pulled up and replaced, the core timber frame would remain.

So there are features to look for when buying a barn to be converted into a home. Here are some important ones:

Age: Generally speaking, the older a barn, the better it was crafted and the larger the timbers. This also means that the parts of the country on the East Coast that were settled earliest tend to have the oldest and nicest barns. But this also means that the older a barn is, the more it has been subjected to wear and tear, which brings up the subject of condition.

Condition: Even a well-crafted barn can have been neglected to the point of no return at which time it is not worth salvaging. The most important feature determining the condition of a barn is the roof. If the roof is intact and does not leak, it is likely that the barn under it is in good condition. On rare occasions, barns were neglected in the distant past and then given a new roof that then hides old rot. An experienced eye can determine this with some probing.

Joinery: A joiner is the person who cuts the end joints of beams into tenons and carves out the mortises, or squared holes, for these tenons to fit into. This is known as mortise and tenon joinery. (The fact that the spell check on my computer does not recognize “tenon” as a word, is proof of how the ancient process of hand joinery has been lost.) The quality of tenons, how tight they fit and how squarely and carefully they were shaped, is a direct reflection of the quality of a barn since it was a skill that could only be acquired with practice and a good teacher. As time passed into the later 1800s, the ancient art of mortise and tenon joinery was replaced with mechanical fasteners, spikes, bolts and plates. Finally, the heavy timbers themselves were replaced with smaller “dimensional lumber” like 2×4’s that were nailed together. So, with the passing away of hand-joinery went the ancient craft of timber framing.

Wood species: Barns were invariably built with the woods from trees that were closest at hand. Generally, there are soft woods (hemlock and pine) and hardwoods (oak, chestnut, beech, poplar, maple). All of these woods make good timber frames. The hardwoods generally were made into lighter framed barns (timber dimension-wise) and the soft woods were more massively framed. Hand-hewn or sawn: The great labor in building a barn was in turning living trees into stable, square building timbers. This task could be accomplished mainly in two ways or in a combination of both. 1) The ancient process of felling a tree with an axe, and then using the axe to chop away the tree into the shape of a square beam was very labor intensive. This process is known as “hand-hewing” and was one of the first tasks that the industrial age tried to eliminate with a machine. And 2) the machine they invented was the saw mill. First the straight-cutting, vertical saw and later, about 1835, the circular saw. Prior to saw mills, there were hand-saws, but their use was limited to cutting tenons, cutting beams to length and in the case of a pit saw, sawing logs into boards.

As time progressed and sawmilling began to overtake and replace hand-hewing during the 1800’s, more and more barn timbers were sawn on mills, beginning with the smaller lengths like the knee braces, since they were most easily gotten to a saw mill. The longer lengths, like the huge top plates, were the last to be sawn on mills since they were simply of unmanageable length and difficult to transport to a sawmill.

One piece plates: the longest parts of a barn frame are the plates. There are two kinds of plates in a barn: top (resting on top of the side walls) and purlin, (supporting the rafters from underneath about in the middle of their length.) The plates run the length of a barn, and in earlier barns they were often one-piece, hewn from single trees. And these could be as long as sixty or even seventy feet!

As trees of such quality and length became rarer and sawmills preferred to cut shorter timbers, plates were sliced with joints called scarf joints. And as quality declined into the late 1800’s, mere “lap joints” joined plates end to end to make up the length of a barn.

Critters: it has been our experience that all barn frames have some current degree of bug infestation. The most pernicious of these critters is the powder post beetle, which defy all but the most complete treatments. To deny their presence is wishful thinking. To buy a barn that has not been fumigated properly is looking for trouble. Once built into a house, these pests have a way of making their presence known and are very expensive to get to move out. Don’t make the mistake of buying an untreated barn frame.

So, there you have a brief primer on what features to look for when barn shopping.

Twice Recylced

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 23:54:20 GMT

Many of the old barns we disassemble and restore for homes were built in the 1800’s with hemlock timbers from New York State. Eastern hemlock (Tsuga Canadensis) is a conifer once widespread in the mountains of the Northeast making up a large portion of the virgin forest. They were massive, straight trees and by counting back their growth rings, we can date these trees back to when they first started growing as early as the 1500’s.

But unlike the eastern white pine that also grew abundantly in the region, hemlock trees were prized primarily for their bark. Hemlock bark is high in tannic acid, which was used to “tan” hides for leather in the early 1800’s.

In order to obtain the bark for the tanning mills, the log cutters and bark peelers would peel off the bark and leave the tree trunks behind as waste by-product of this early American industrial process. Then, in the wake of the tree cutters came farmers who recycled the logs and hand-hewed them into beams for their homes and barns. It is estimated that as many as 70 million hemlock trees were cut for their bark. Not only did the tanners clear cut whole forests, but tanneries also needed water for the tanning process and so were located along streams that they also conveniently dumped their spent tanning solutions into.

The tanning process often included using mercury and many a tanner and hatter, (as hats were made from tanned beaver skins) showed the effect of exposure to this heavy metal on their nervous systems, thus the origin of the phrase “Mad as a Hatter.”

So, not only were these hemlock timbers salvaged from old barns by us in the 21st Century, they were salvaged long ago after they had their bark peeled, so we can say they’ve been “twice recycled.”

Deep Under the Heart of Texas

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:15:37 GMT

(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.

Old Scotch Barns in the New World

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 00:03:10 GMT

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 in 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 resemble the framing of English barns.

The examples we have encountered are 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 points 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.

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.

Why were so many barns painted red?

Tue, 10 May 2011 23:56:59 GMT

Many years ago, choices for paints, sealers and other building materials did not exist. Farmers had to be resourceful in finding or making a paint that would protect and seal the wood on their barns. Hundreds of years ago, many farmers would seal their barns with linseed oil, which is an orange-colored oil derived from the seeds of the flax plant. To this oil, they would add a variety of things, most often milk and lime, but also ferrous oxide, or rust. Rust was plentiful on farms and because it killed fungi and mosses that might grow on barns, was very effective as a sealant. It turned the mixture red in color. When paint became more available, many people chose red paint for their barns in honor of tradition. (Farmers Almanac)