Barn Communities

Barns Used to Have Communities    

Here's a nice standard 135 year-old timber frame barn where the 100 acres of land was taken out of the crown in 1868 for $50. For another $50 the pioneer bought the 100 acre farm backing on this one, which is the farm we now own. When we were looking to buy a farm in 1984 near Chesley, this 200 acre farm, with a story-and-a-half frame house, 40 by 60 foot barn, driving shed and out buildings, was selling for about $65,000. We hummed and hawed and opted to build our own house from the mostly tall hardwood bush in back 100 acres. A severance was accepted by council and the rest...well, young age and a lack of cynicism got us to where we are today--a timber frame home from our trees and a few scattered outbuildings, including my stackwall workshop.
The only regret I have is not having a heritage barn. But then my son and his girl friend, who purchased the original farm a few years ago, now own it so I get to use the barn as well.
Back in the late 1800's, when the barn was built, it wasn't just in the middle of nowhere, but had a community around it. A one room, originally a log and later brick school house, was constructed within eyesight of the farm. Just up the road in the hamlet of Peabody, was a blacksmith, a carriage shop, wheel maker and furniture craftsman. For brick houses there was Boem's brickyard in Scone, about 5 miles away and for windows there was a planing mill in Desboro, about the same distance. As well, in Peabody was the all-important general store, and later gas station. Anderson's saw mill, beginning operation in 1881, was just around the corner. It’s all gone now, except for the school, which still stands proudly today, with the new owners ringing the bell on special occasions.

This community was not an exception, all over rural Ontario in the 1800’s these little communities sprang up, and then 100 years later they have disappeared.

Farm help in 1900 was paid 75 cents per day and room and board was charged at 30 cents.
The barn is a typical timber frame of the area consisting of five bents with queen posts supporting the purlins. Most of the timbers are maple and white ash, which is what we built our house from, as we cut from the same bush.
But the size of the trees then! The purlins in the barn are one piece, 60 feet in length, and all the 40 foot horizontal girts, five of them, are one tree timbers as well.
The barn floors are from hemlock, as are some of my horizontal  girts in our house, and all the barn rafters, sawn from Anderson's mill, are one piece and about 28 feet in length.  My son put up new barn board this past summer, and did some repair work inside and I imagine the barn will stand for another 100 years.

BARN IN BENTINCK TOWNSHIP, ONTARIO

This 107 year old timber frame barn, now owned by Dan Weirmeir, is said to be the highest barn in former Bentinck Township, West Grey, Ontario, at about 40 feet high.
The four bent, 52 foot by 60 foot barn had an overhang on the south side which was closed in by Richard Weirmeir, who bought the Lot 15, Concession 11 NDR farm, located about 6 kilometers east of Elmwood, in 1960.
Robert Weirmeir, Richard’s son and Dan’s father, remembers helping to lay the first steel on the high pitched roof over top of the original cedar shingles about 40 years ago.
“It was real scary on the north corner as it was so high,” he said so he preferred nailing the steel on the south side where there was an “L” addition. “You had a 50/50 chance of bouncing off the addition,” Robert laughed.
At the beginning during the 1960’s and ‘70’s Richard had a mixed operation, like many of the local farmers. They built some stanchions in the high stables and milked six to ten cows and shipped cream. In the spring wiener pigs were bought, fattened all summer and sold in the fall. Beef cattle were grazed and housed in the stables during the winter. Pigs and cattle were sold at the Keady auction. Sometimes, Robert remembers, cattle buyers came by the farm with fat wallets, offering $250, $275 and even $300 per beef cow, all in cash, with $100 bills being counted over and over again until a deal was struck.
Everyone in Richard’s family, one son and two daughters, and his wife Helen (Halliday) helped with farm chores. Cows were milked by a simple ¾ inch vacuum pipeline and a portable milker, grain was bucketed down from the granary in the mow, through a chute to the pigs and cows below. Dan and Robert both remember the large high mow, full of square bales of straw on one side and hay on the other, being above the eaves of the barn.
Richard, who was a Bentinck councilor and deputy reeve for many years, did custom haying and combining with his Massey Harris Super 92 for many years. He would cut and bale first-cut hay for local farmers, then came the grain combining and then second-cut hay. “He was away a lot, and in between all that he would do our hay and grain,” Robert said. The 102 acre farm had “good land,” Robert says, with only about 3 acres of bush and 3 acres of rough land and the rest workable. Fields were divided into 4 and 6 acre parcels, and each field had different crops. “Farming was prosperous in the “70’s,” Robert remembers.
Originally inside the barn, there were two tracks for hay carriers, one at the peak and another on the north side, where the ramp came in. What is somewhat of a timber frame mystery is that all the outside bottoms of the posts of the barn have a four foot section beautifully scarf notched in as an extension. Looking at some of the timbers inside, there are used ones for the top plates, some girt connectors and the posts themselves. Since this barn wasn’t built until 1904, a previous barn on the farm could have been taken down and the timbers re-used. Perhaps the posts of the previous barn, or another in the area that was taken down, were too short and those extensions were notched in to allow a higher timber frame structure to be raised.
The roof rafters are round, signifying an earlier built barn, but could have been re-used from a previous one. The queen post timber frame, where the top of the bent has a long brace to meet the purlin, has timbers with sawmill and hand adzed marks, again indicating new and re-used timbers.
The main concrete ramp into the barn has a cistern underneath it which was filled by rainwater or by a pump from the well. This watered the cattle and pigs inside the stables. On the cement lid of the cistern are initials “W.W.” and the date, “1931.” Farmer Wilfred H. Wright owned this farm from 1922 until 1958 and was proud of the ramp and cistern he built.

Taking Down 12-Sided Barn

I have taken down barns before, usually to use some of the timbers for another building project. But last winter I was asked to take a barn down this summer (August) and put it back again five miles away. (Here is the original photo of when it was built in 1919.)
This was no usual timber frame barn but a 90-year old 12-sided historic barn located up north on the north shore of Lake Huron near a little town called Sowerby, which is near and politically part of the bigger town of Iron Bridge. There are only three 12-sided barns left in Canada, and two were located 1 mile apart (one of which I was taking down) and the third is in Mystic, Quebec, which is on the front cover of my second book, Barn Building.
I accepted of course, for here was a challenge and a chance at discovering how it was built and how I was going to rebuild it, which was to be in the summer of 2010.
I drove up with a car load of tools and stayed with Will and Elaine Samis, both wonderful, intellectually stimulating people, who also farmed 100 head of beef. Boy we had some great conversations around the dinner table late into the night.
The barn is 62 feet in diameter and about 40 feet high. Not a small building. It was situated right off the Trans-Canada highway, was owned by a family who had given it the Municipality of Huron Shores to have it put back up and used as a meeting and dance hall, museum, art exhibition, sales barn, auction house, farm market etc.
Luckily some of my Amish neighbours from where I live had moved up in there and were willing to help take it down, along with some volunteers. I drew up a schedule of what I thought would be a reasonable time to do things and got to it the second day I was there. With three Amish on the roof, Toby, Mehlan and Joseph and volunteer Gary, and others on the ground we began taking off the sheets of steel. We finished that day and it was hot work. The next day we finished banging off all the boards below the metal that were covering most of the roof. Third day, still hot, we took off all 26 tamarack rafter poles, about 28 ft long each and another 24 rafter supports. That was a fun day, as we lowered one side of the rafter by rope to the floor and then the other side. Some of the rafters were thicker and I flew into the air, holding on to the end of the rope a few times, as it was heavier then me as I lowered them down. Whee!
That was the end of that week and on Monday, an extremely hot muggy day, we managed to bang off all the outside barn boards. Now it was time for the crane.
Kelly and his dad both volunteered their time to operate the 110 ft crane, which was donated for free for 2 days. We began by tearing off wall sections as they were nailed (I later found out with 8 inch nails!) at many different places. We got a method going and finally finished that day. All that was left standing was the tower.
The tower is a 35 foot timber frame structure in the middle of the barn, 16 ft square, which was made up of mostly 10 by 10 pines. The next day Kelly clambered up (I had to convince him to take a safety line up with him!) and he hooked it up to the crane , got off and we slowly began to lift the whole thing up. No problem. The tower was then lowered onto the grass on its side and we began pounding the pins out and lifting off by crane each piece. But in the middle of all this, when we had lowered the tower, Kelly said why don’t we transport the ring on top to the new site today. Now. He had a transport truck and flat bed trailer and he could do it.
The ring is a 22-foot wide 12-sided top to the tower which takes in all the rafters and could be disconnected, which we did promptly. It weighed about 400 pounds and Kelly guided it onto the flat bed with the crane. Now the problem is that usually a 22-foot wide object transported on the road is too wide (lanes are 11 feet wide) and you need permits and a police escort to do this. And also we had to travel on the Trans Canada highway, for just one kilometer and then take side roads, but still. Anyway, this is the north after all, and everyone got busy, Kelly got into the truck and pulled up the highway, while Will went to the top of the hill, cell phone in hand to tell me when Kelly could pull out. “OK, after this white truck,” he said. Looking the other way though was a Winnebago approaching. Gary quickly ran out into the middle of the 4 lane road (passing lanes on both sides) and stopped the Winnebago, who was not happy, and Kelly pulled out. From there everything went smoothly and they unloaded at the other end. Yay! Meanwhile we kept on working and finished taking apart the tower.
The next day we pulled out the sleepers (joists) and were officially finished after stacking and covering all the material. I had a lot of laughs with the Amish and great cooperation and help with all the volunteers, including David, Ron, Will and others. Thanks for a good job. Now we wait until next year to put it back up, with lots more new lumber and more adventures, I’m sure.

Only Three Twelve Sided Barns in Canada

In Canada there are only 3-twelve sided barns. (There are many more in the USA). One is in the province of Quebec in the little historic village of Mystic. That barn, which is on the front cover of my latest book, "Barn Building," has many extraordinary features. Not only has it twelve sides but it has twelve distinct roofs as well. You can see and read more about that one in my book.

The other two are located in the north, near Iron Bridge, Ontario, which is haflway between Sudbury and Sault Ste marie. Now what are two complicated barns doing up north where Lake Huron's warming affects give farmers a short growing season and the Canadian Shield, starting just north of the lake, prevents anymore farming altogether.

The three barn's construction are related, so the story goes which is gathered from a few different sources. While the Mystic barn was built in 1882, one of the workers there moved all the way to the Iron Bridge area and built this 62-foot diameter barn pictured here in 1919. One of his workers who helped, then built the 3rd 12-sided barn about 1 mile away in 1928. Amazing how these things work out and are related.

The period beginning in 1900 was a boom time for towns and farmers in this area as the last of the great pine forests growing there were being cut down to build the cities of North America. Farmers had huge demands not only for produce and meat, but hay and grain to feed the hundreds of horses needed to log the bushes in the surrounding areas. By the 1920's it was all over, most of the good pockets of pine were logged out and then the Great Depression came, wiping out demand.

Luckily both barns are still standing and I was fortunate to have been invited on the annual barn tour up there by farmer and organizer Will Samis. "Barns are our biggest antiques," Will says. He is so right. And there is an effort to save this barn and move it down the road about 10 miles to the hamlet of Sowerby as a meeting place, dance hall, art display, antique impliment display-- a kind of museum with a social flair. The owners of the barn don't farm and don't really want it and have given to the local Heritage Farm Building tour buffs. They recieved a grant from the Ministry of Culture to take the barn down, preserve all the working timber frame pieces, and put it back up.

And, I have been asked to supervise and organize this event. Oh boy, what a fantastic challenge. And here is another coincidence. My Amish neighbour, who made the windows for my house 10 years ago and has tons of building expeience, moved up to Iron Bridge last year. I got to visit with him and his family when I was there. So... I've asked him and his brothers to help with the barn, and even though they are very busy carving a new life out of this northern frontier, he wrote me a letter recently saying he would help. It's going to be a great challenge, but fun for all as well. We'll see this summer.