The other day, I was reading an article about the organization called Your Old Barn Study and it brought back memories of the old barn on the farm I grew up on north of Lucknow.
I have no idea when our barn was built but it was probably around 1900, when houses were also built in the area. Like most barns of the era, there were two levels: the stable on the lower level and the most obvious part, a tall-storey barn upstairs where there was a hay mow, a straw mow, a granary and a “threshing floor”.
Our barn was built into the side of a hill so the stable had doors at the back for cattle and horses to go in and out to a barnyard. You could go into the mows on the level, unlike neighbours who had a gang-way to enter the mow area.
As a kid, the excitement was in the upper part of the barn. We used loose hay when I was youngest, taken from loaded wagons with a large fork that was plunged into the load. It was raised when a rope pulled it to the ceiling powered by horses or a tractor, where it travelled on a track over to the mow where it was “tripped” and fell into the mow below. It was then distributed evenly across the mow.
This is where the fun for us kids began. When haying was finished, we’d climb up onto one of the stout beams in the mow, grab the rope and swing out, dropping into the loose hay. The fun was best, of course, soon after haying before the hay in the mow settled and became too hard to land in.
When haying finished and the hay settled, the wait was on until threshing. Most neighbours then used threshing machines. In our case, the threshing machine sat outside the barn. The straw was blown into the mow and grain was delivered into the granary. The grain had to be shovelled into the corners by some unlucky soul, fighting the dust that was also blown into the barn.
But there was fun to be had for young boys, at least, when haying and harvest were over. Unknown to our parents we dug tunnels in the hay and the straw under the sturdy beams that held the barn up.
Down on the threshing floor we had a place to play a cramped game of softball when the weather was unpleasant outside.
In winter, the stable was a pleasant spot with the cattle, pigs and horses providing their heat to keep the temperature much warmer than the outside sub-zero weather.
My parents sold our farm to my sister and her husband; we moved to town when I was a teenager. Some time later, a windstorm devastated the old barn. They replaced it with a modern one-storey barn where they could do most of the work with a tractor.
Later, my brother-in-law’s health deteriorated and he had to sell the farm. It was bought by an Old Order Mennonite who built an old-style two-storey barn beside my brother-in-law’s barn so they could farm the old way.
The article I read suggests there were 500,000 barns in 1900, but fewer than 100,000 today. Ontario’s population has grown from 4.5 million in 1950 to 16.9 million today with many former farms buried under asphalt and houses.
Many of the remaining farms have changed, or course. In my own neighbourhood there are huge poultry and hog barns. Some old barns have been repurposed. In Brussels, a barn was moved into town and made into a meeting and dance hall.
The Your Old Barn Study is an effort to document the old barns before they disappear. It hopes to empower owners of old barns to come forward and fill in data themselves, instead of sending out volunteers to search the countryside for old barns.
Farming has changed so much, except for Old Order Mennonites and Amish mainly. Thanks to the Your Old Barn Study for recording old barns before they disappear.◊