Einar Olson’s infamous tobacco barn
The barn is the centerpiece to the American Family. This statement holds true for some families today but it was true for most families of your grandparents generation. If you inspect a barn closely you may find some pretty spectacular things. It was common practice during the time of homesteading that the family built their working barn around a single room in the barn in which the family lived while working the land. Once the family had worked hard enough to save the needed money, they would build a second building, usually another single room, on the property in which to live and remove the single room in the barn. Sometimes you can still find the studs for the original living quarters in one corner of a barn. Another common occurrence is that many living rooms of old farmhouses were the one room cabin that the family started with and as the finances and the family grew, the house would grow around this one room as well.
One interesting thing I found while reclaiming a barn was all the framing studs in the milking parlor had grooves cut into them. The groves of a “tongue and groove” style of building method. It made no sense why interior studs would be cut this way. I asked everybody I knew why these studs would be this way. I got a lot of answers but none really fit the bill. While talking with the family about the barn, I mentioned my discovery and the question about the grooves. “Oh! He said, we tore down the corn crib in order to frame the barn.” So, my reclaimed barn wood had already been reclaimed once before! I like it!
Tongue and Groove barn boards
The barn is where the action is. It’s the first thing that is built on the land and it’s the keeper of all the secrets. A young child’s hideout to shake invading pirates, a teenager’s escape in efforts to feel an ever eluding first kiss, mom and dad’s hiding place for the family’s Christmas packages (think Chevy Chase stuck in the attic) and everything in between. At first glance it’s just dirty boards, chaff from years of harvests, dust from many years of equipment coming and going, a spider’s home, but a closer look will reveal the barn’s secrets. Markings from an event long ago but still remembered, an imaginary game of basketball with no hoop, or the wear of repetitive motion over decades. If you stop and breathe in it, the barn comes to life to reveal its secrets to you.
Barns have different shapes and features depending on their intended purpose, the unique climate of its location, the time period and heritage of the builders or the type of elevation it’s built on. For instance, if its intended purpose is to store hay it would be built of board and batten style to let just the right amount of air flow through the barn to keep the hay from spoiling. Have you ever heard the phrase “batten down the hatches?” If the barn was for drying tobacco, the siding boards would just butt to each other without adding the battens or sometimes every other siding board would be slightly pitched for added air flow depending on the climate. Barns built into the side of a hill would have a ground level entry on each floor for easy access. These are called Bank Barns and are very common in the driftless region of Southwest Wisconsin.
Board and Batten siding artwork
Old barns today.
Farmers aren’t wasteful by nature so they always want to get the most bang for their buck when it comes to labor, machinery or facilities, but times they are a changin’. The barns of yesterday were built for the equipment and the work of their time. This means smaller horse drawn equipment and storage for a farm supporting a single family, which could mean only ten to thirty milking cattle. Today’s farms may milk several hundred cattle and house gigantic equipment to raise crops to feed thousands of people or animals. Today’s needs would never fit in the barn that grandpa or great grandpa built. The health of the old barn is at risk in this situation. The best way to keep a barn in healthy working order is to keep it full of something and keep the roof in good repair. If either of these two items are ignored, the life of the barn is diminished by decades. Once a barn loses its integrity it is extremely costly to bring it back to working order and if it’s not needed for current operations….well, remember when I said farmers aren’t wasteful? This is when I get a call.
Me: “This is Jeremiah.”
Farmer: “I hear you take down barns.”
Me: “I do.”
Working with farmers.
Farmers are smart people. Very smart. When I get stumped on a problem, my first call is usually to a farmer friend of mine. Farmers have also seen their fair share of traveling salesmen. You know the kind. So when a stranger pulls up into the drive and starts asking questions about grandpa’s barn, the answer is usually “NO” no matter what the question is. This was my experience five, six, seven years ago, but today people have heard of me, they have seen me on the news or in the paper and they know that I will be honest about every part of the barn reclamation process and that grandpa’s barn, and the family legacy will live on for years to come. They have seen and heard stories of strangers coming in and only taking the easy or the most valuable parts and leaving a bigger mess than before. They call me because they know that I don’t operate that way and I have established myself in this fashion for years as well as carry the proper insurance to do the work on their property. On my end, it’s a different experience as well. The farmers I work with don’t have facebook or email, they don’t text either, but their word is as good as gold and they look you in the eye when they shake your hand.
The news they see: https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/st-raphael-steeple-getting-the-barn-treatment-so-it-can/article_8ced9817-b40c-5671-9f04-213eef027140.html
What makes a good barn to reclaim?
Because I have been doing this work for quite some time and people have seen or heard of me I get calls and messages all the time. “Hey, there’s this barn and it’s falling down and I got the name of the guy for you…” I love this because it makes my job so much easier. There is an ideal sort of barn to reclaim and this is what it consists of: Typically the barn has to be built before the mid 1930’s. This isn’t always the case but somewhere in that decade lumber started to be milled much the way it is today and will look similar to today’s lumber. This new lumber doesn’t have the saw marks of yesterday that give it the look people desire. The next item is that the barn can’t be already falling down. This makes it unsafe to work around due to pressures on certain boards that might snap apart without notice and hurt of kill someone near it. Next, the barn has to be within forty minutes of my storage. In order to take every last piece and keep the original ends of every board I spend about 250 hours of labor to reclaim it. This computes to a lot of trips with equipment and trailers and the like. It’s an expense endeavor that is strictly speculative at this point. When I say original ends I mean, not using a chain saw to simply buzz off the best parts and leave the rest for the burn pile. Saving every last part from the landfill is my mantra for one, but two, it gives my artwork a very unique look that is hard to replicate.
Saw cut marks indicating age of the barn
The process of reclaiming a barn.
I think of the reclamation of a barn much like the Inuit Tribes would think of a whale. Everyone is skinny so the hunters harvest a whale. The whale is huge and feeds everyone for a long while. Everyone gets their stocks back up to a healthy level but after a while they become skinny once more and the process repeats. The best way to reclaim a barn and harvest as much material as possible is to start at the top. After the barn is emptied, the shingles are all removed and recycled. Next, the roofing boards come off and then the siding boards. Lastly, the wooden pegs are removed and the frame comes apart from the top down to the foundation. Every last piece that can be used is saved from the landfill just as the Inuits would have used every piece of the whale. Even the nails and the pegs! Besides, it’s actually against the law to burn or bury any barn in Wisconsin so your only alternatives are to put it in a landfill or call me. Calling me is more ecological and economical….remember what I said about farmers?
In the belly of a barn whale
If you know of a barn that fits in with what I described above, I invite you to contact me here.
If you would like to see all the artwork that I have created out of reclaimed material you can follow us on Facebook or Instagram
Every piece is founded on an ecological principle of upcycling Wisconsin’s proud heritage and landscape into functional art for future generations, preserving the history of these buildings while bringing awareness to the need for us all to think before we consume. Every piece starts with a question; how can I transform material slated for refuse into beauty, value and a new life in our community? 59 tons saved to date.