The Threshing Floor

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Early settlers came to America from many different countries and brought with them from Europe not only their ways of living, but also their architecture, including their agricultural buildings [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

(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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]