Backroads Reminiscing

Golly, I have shot a lot of photos in my travels the last several years.  Most are not terribly interesting; tree plantations, trees with problems, roadside dumps; generally not worth posting but they are reminders to me of places I have been.  I noticed this barn tonight as I scrolled through photo months.  It is a good barn quilt on a well-maintained old barn, just east of the Little Wabash River in rural Edwards County, Illinois.  The roof is straight and tight, a lean to was added long ago, probably for parking machinery, and part of the siding has been covered with metal siding.  It is straight, too, which is not easy to maintain with old barns. 

Gone

I snapped this photo a bit over two years ago.  This barn was obviously doomed when we saw the tin roof coming off, even though it was a much better building than our old barn that we have been jacking up out of the termites for thirty-some years.  The taxes on old barns like this really aren't the problem in Illinois.  An old building that does not contribute to the farm is taxed at a very low rate as an encouragement for farm families to preserve a bit of their history, but there is still upkeep to take care of, and a coat of paint every few years is an inconvenient expense.

Well, we still have a stack of lumber in our barn for doing repairs, and I hope we can get back to the north side this summer and replace some of the bad wood.  After we finish with the walls we need to come up with a strategy to deal with the rafters and roof.

Beautiful Barn, Beautiful Quilt

I drive by this nice barn quilt regularly, but I am usually in a hurry, and there is usually a gray sky.  This week it had blue sky and a minute to pause for a pic.  It's a joy.

I'm A Sucker For Old Barns....

...Here's a good one I saw recently.

Those ventilators look a bit Steam Punkish, don't they?

A Barn...

 

..Stood Here.  Walked a quarter section of timber today, and found the old homesite; also the trash pile, and the old horse drawn wagon, and a Hudson.  You can tell this was a barn by the hay rail draped over the foundation stones.  There is a manure spreader standing next to it, so this was a busy farm at one time.  I shouldn't get blue when I find places like this, but I do.  More photos will come in another post.  I love Hudsons.  Brat, and a couple of very old 7" discs are uploading to YT now, and I will post him in the morning. It's been a long day, David aka TBS.

Cleared For Takeoff: Another New Barn Door!

We need to do a bit more surgery on the east end of the barn, then we will be ready to hang the last section of rail, and then the other new door.

Boy do we hate this dark time. 

Out Behind The Barn....

...we are finally buttoning things up a bit.  We started on the backside of the barn in 2003, rebuilding rotted framework and re-siding some big open spots.  The back of the barn hasn't had doors since before we moved to the farm in 1980.  That is about to change, and we have the doors built except for screwing tin onto the frame.  Our tin should be in Friday, and our doors should be installed by Saturday evening.  Here is the back of the barn in 2001.

 And today.  The corners need to be closed in, but the frame is good, and most of the siding is good.  The field east of the old barn is now pole size timber.  In '01 it was in the sapling phase, and today it is prime deer hunting cover.  Our friend Troy will be hunting from the old barn this weekend, and I bet he takes home some venison.

This is how it looked out behind the barn in the fall of 2001...

...and this is how it looked in the fall of 2012.  We planted this field around 1990.  I drove our old John Deere B, Susan rode the planter and stuck every tree in the ground.

More Photos from 2001, and 2003:

 2001

 '03, Dad passed away in 2005.

 '03

 '03

 Green Berry and Cora Soper Darsham milking behind the barn about 1924.  Green and Cora signed the papers to buy the home place on September 11, 1903.

You Call It!

A:  Ramshackle
B: Airish
C: Threadbare
D: Hardly Able

This one has been in my sights for many years, and as I came up on it this time, a quick check of the rear-view mirror was clear!  I hit the shoulder and got my shot. 

Cascading Infirmities

A: Swayback
B: Dilapidated
C: Decrepit
D: All Of The Above

Meltdown

All that's left to linger on...

Barn

What Barn?

Nothing to see here, folks; just move along.

Going, Going...

 The dozer cleared trees that had grown up in the old barnyard, and the last time I drove by there was a track-hoe sitting next to the dozer.

It's probably all over by now.  Barns like this were outdated technology fifty years ago, and the families who used them are long-gone.  The Mrs. and I have been patching on our barn for more than thirty years, and we will never be done, although we are gaining little by little.  We have big plans for 2013; ripping out old wood, fitting new pieces, bolting and nailing.  Dilapidated old buildings like this old dairy barn give me a sense of urgency to get back to work on our ongoing project.

Barn Quilts Are Catching On In Hamilton County!

The newest barn quilt in Hamilton County, Illinois is Gloria's, and it can be seen just north of McLeansboro on the west side of IL Hwy 242.  Gloria hired her friend Becky (A professional painter.) to create the quilt, and some very nice people with a bucket truck put it up last week.  Way To Go, Becky and Gloria!!!

The Big Barn

 The Big Barn is one of the more obscure cultural oddities you have never heard about before.  The barn is in southeast White County, Illinois, a short distance from the Wabash River.

The Wabash River floods regularly, making agriculture difficult, even in our modern era with sophisticated machines.  The farmer who built this barn on stilts went to great lengths to build it above the floods.  Cement pillars hold it about fifteen feet in the air, and there was a ramp at both ends.  Give a thought to how it would have been built.  The holes for the pillars had to be dug by hand, and dug deep.  The cement would have been mixed on-site, and the process of mixing and pouring had to have gone on for days on end.

 I last saw this barn about nine years ago, and it was a solid structure yet at that time.  I didn't have a camera with me then, but I did last week when I was on a property next door.  Storms of recent years have really taken a toll on the old building.

 The runway through the center had double floor joists.  The lumber used for construction was not planed, and was probably sawed in the neighborhood from bottomland hardwoods.

 This aerial photo from 2005 shows that the roof was intact at that time.

The barn sits just south of the curve in the trail at the top of the photo.  This peninsula is an odd feature on the map.  It is lengthening to the south as the river deposits sediment.  Timber is growing on the undocumented land, and there are several acres that don't belong to anyone, although they are landlocked by the owner of this timber.  The river bank above and below this peninsula is collapsing a bit every year, making land disappear.  There isn't much you can do about it; rivers like to move around.  There are several landowners adjacent to the river who are planting trees, and that will eventually curb major changes during flood events.

UPDATE BONUS! A commenter sent me looking for more barns like this one, and I found two barns on Wabash Island (at the confluence of the Wabash River and the Ohio). These images from Google Earth are USDA photos shot in 2011. Note that the Ohio was flooding, and much of the island has water running over it.

Here's What's Up

 The Mrs. stayed busy this fall laying out and painting a bear claw (with star) barn quilt.   She finished it last week, and we mounted it on a frame Christmas Eve. 

 Lifting into position was easy.   We clamped a hand winch on the end of the hay rail, loosened the top two siding boards, and ran the winch line down.  We cranked up the quilt, drilled the first hole for a mounting bolt, stuck the first bolt, and then clicked the winch up a bit to level the wife's masterpiece.  Lots of ladder moving and climbing up and down was necessary to drill the rest of the  mounting holes, but we soon had all the bolts stuck.

We finished up after dark, as usual.

Weather Worth Working In

 The weather last week during the long holiday weekend was warm for November; warm enough to paint the new wood on the old barn.  We fired up the Graco sprayer, and soon had a good coat on the newest siding, and recoated the siding we had painted earlier.

 We had sprayed thinned linseed oil on all the siding a few weeks back, and added extra oil to our paint.  We hope that it will help the barn shed water for many years.

We finished up the painting right at sunset, and cleaned out the spray equipment in the dark.  Next weekend:  Firewood, weather or not!

BangBangBangBangBangBangBangBangBangBang.....

 We finished the siding project for the southwest corner of the barn Sunday.  I realized Saturday night that my old ears don't like the sound of nails being pounded, and I wore ear protection Sunday.  It doesn't take much to turn up the tinnitus volume nowadays.

While we worked on this side Saturday and Sunday we made frequent trips into the barn for boards and nails, then to the garage to run the table saw, then to the barn to drive nails.  The deer that hang out in our woods stayed right out back, only about 100 feet from where we worked.  They could see us clearly in the barn when we were pulling boards out of our stash.  They are pretty tame as long as we stay on our side of the line.  Our friend Troy stopped by for a brief visit, and when I took him back in the barn to have a look at the herd, they all disappeared.  Must have been his camo, or maybe they could read his mind.

Changes

 I noted on my last trip to Iowa that this corn crib is gone now, and the entire farmstead is slicked off for row-cropping.  These drive through cribs were equipped with an elevator in the center of the building that took ear corn up into the cupola, where it was put down a chute into the bins on either side.  

 During the 1960's, most farmers made the switch to shelling corn in the field, and storing the shelled corn in bins equipped with a dryer.  The old buildings were handy for parking wagons and other implements, but they have gradually been disappearing from the landscape.  There aren't many left.

Back when cribs were still being used to store and dry corn, you could buy a Maid-Rite sandwich for 30 cents, and a cup of coffee for a dime.  I remember when the proprietor of the Maid-Rite shop in Washington, Iowa raised his price to 35 cents, and everyone in town was telling him he would go out of business.  They get a lot more for a Maid-Rite nowadays, and 35 cents is a dim memory.  The price didn't hurt his business, but a few years later a Hardees moved in nearby, and it snagged most of the lunch crowd from the high school and the downtown area.  That's what did in the Maid-Rite in Washington.

Disappearing Acts

I can think of half a dozen old barns/and or houses that have been torn down and burned around us in recent months.  I drove by this place on nearly a daily basis, and it is down to just a small pile of lumber that will soon be burned.  The top photo was taken two years ago, and I took the one below just yesterday. (Photo Credit for the first picture goes to JimH.)

The face of farm country is changing fast, and the family farms we like to envision really do not exist anymore, except  in the Amish and Mennonite communities.  One of the things that bothers me is that the barns I see being knocked down and burned are usually better than the one I am working on.  This barn is over 100 years old, and raising it up out of the termites is a never-ending task.

Our current focus is on the southwest corner, which had no sound wood holding up the roof.  The footer was poured during the early 1950's, and for some reason it has a kink in it.  The south wall leaned out to meet the rafters, and we poured a new foot for the corner, which we think is lined up pretty well.  Lining things up is sort of a relative thing in a building with no parallel lines or right angles.  As we put new wood back into our barn we are mainly shooting for less whopperjawed-ness.

Always Something

I've always heard that if you need something to do, get an old truck. An old barn can sure beat a truck to keep you busy. If something is difficult to fix, you can't send it off to a shop to have it worked on. You have to do it yourself, or let the barn fall apart. Last year we put in two new timbers to the left of the door, plus did a bunch of mending where those timbers tied into the rest of the structure. We rehung the siding in the center section, and now we are moving to the next things that need to be fixed.

Some timbers in the loft are off of the uprights, and in order to rig jacks to pick them up we had to start on the ground to jack up and reinforce things.

We jacked up the floor in this spot until it was straight (A relative term) and installed a timber under it so we have a good base to work from up above.

Things kind of fall apart after 100 plus years. Gravity has been pulling parts down little by little, and they do not go up again easily.

Jacks are holding up the roof as we maneuver the horizontal timber back into place.

We use a pretty good variety of jacks, levers, chains, come-alongs, and of course, hammers.

Bolting things together.

Forcing the next one back into place. There is a jack pushing the roof up from down below, a High-Lift jack pulling the timber over, and a temporary timber between the uprights to keep things from moving that we don't want moved. As soon as this spot is bolted into place we will be ready to start hanging siding again...Then more timber work.