Magnolia Barn

Can you imagine being a farmer in the late 1800s, cutting down trees with a hand saw and having to hitch up your horses and drag all of them back to your farm? I sure can’t. That’s why this old barn fascinates me. It has a story that’s lost to time. We can only guess what its history is. Whatever its story may be, I’d bet the farmer never dreamed his barn would make its way down to Waco, Texas someday.

Our friends at Heritage Restorations are in the business of finding and moving historic barns—as far as from here to China. They found this one in the Ontario, Canada area, and sent a sample of its wood for testing. As best they could tell, this thing was originally built back in the 1870’s. Heritage Restorations disassembled it, cleaned it up, and shipped it all the way to Waco.

Each one of the barn’s bents is about 3,000 pounds—and raising barns as heavy as this one by hand, rather than using a crane and other heavy machinery, isn’t done anymore in America. So we thought what better way to kick off our new barn pavilion than with an old-fashioned “barn raising” like they would’ve done back in the 1800s to raise this thing up.

The whole family and the film crew were there bright and early on the morning of April 29, 2016 to help kick off the raising of the barn. The boys got to try lifting this giant wooden mallet to hammer wooden pegs into place on the beams, and Chip, along with the help of about 20 men, raised the first bent into place.