The Beauty & Functionality of Barns; a Closer Look

Barns are an essential part of our rural identity. Silent reminders of a time before urbanization when more of us lived in the countryside than the city. Their inherent beauty comes from their utility & that utility persists to this day in the rural landscape. It has undergone many changes though, and taken on many forms.

Barn Restoration Ideas

The pragmatic design and nearly universal layout of barns makes them so adaptable to whatever use their resident farmer can dream up for them. From housing equipment to hosting weddings, the only limit to their use is our willingness to see it & our commitment to the preservation of the building. Our own barn, originally a stout 28×24 horse barn has been gutted and transformed to host a lambing pen and a milking stanchion. The hayloft sits empty but could host a studio, or perhaps a guest house.

What is an Old Barn Worth?

That these rural beauty queens still stand at all is a testament to the original craftsmen who built them. Built from raw lumber, hewn stone and clay, they blend into the very landscape they were sourced from. Many have been lost already, and many more are falling victim to time, weather and the cold realities of rural economics. If you have a barn on your property, some preventative maintenance goes along way:

• Maintaining painted and/or stained surfaces
• Replacing localized rot where it appears
• Sealing leaks in the roof line
• Preventing foliage growth close to the foundation
• Draining standing water away from the foundation
• Replacing old, worn out electric wires

In my opinion these structures deserve preservation and upkeep. I believe we must work to maintain these structures in all their glory for future generations to enjoy long after we are gone. We don’t truly own them so much as we borrow them; having existed before our arrival and, if we are conscientious and deliberate of our use of them, they will outlast us.

Barn Restoration Resources

You would expect that more is being done to preserve them, being such an important part of our cultural heritage and our collective memory. There is little to find however, beyond scrap wood salvagers who understand the rarity of the lumber in question. I started looking into funding and grants to repair our own barn or to relocate a similar local barn but with no luck. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised to discover the relative indifference of our government to the fate of rural barns; as most of the voter base live in the city now after all, & yet for some reason I expected more.

Given the inherent versatility of these structures, the durability of the original materials used – as well as the cultural and the emotional significance of old barns, we need to proactively be working to preserve them for future generations. Our predecessors worked too hard to allow these beautiful buildings to simply crumble back into the landscape or be relegated to theme parks and outdoor museums.