On your way south into Huntington center along Huntington Road, you’ll pass a barn with a sign high on the side reading “Liberty Head Post & Beam.” It is 40 feet by 30 feet, with two sliding doors on the long side abutting the road. The age-darkened clapboard siding is held in place with round, machined nails. The sliding doors open onto the second floor, while the lower floor is entered through iron-hinged doors at the bottom of the slope. A wooden cupola projects up from the roof, with a weather vane decorating the top.
If you peek through the crack between the doors, you can see piles of construction materials used in Liberty Head Post & Beam’s work — the company builds and restores timber frame buildings, like this barn.
But 150 years ago, if you’d peeked inside, you might have seen a farmer and his field hands swinging wooden clubs over their heads, beating the piles of wheat stalks on the floor to remove the seeds. Or you might have seen them stowing the threshed hay on one end of the barn, feeding the stabled horses and oxen on the other and shoveling the manure through a hole in the floor into the basement below. The farmer might have been sitting on a crate by the open doors, mending tack. Or he might have been down below, shoveling manure into a wagon to spread on the fields in springtime.
The Liberty Head Post & Beam barn is an English barn. This was the first kind of barn built in New England, based on a design used since the Middle Ages and brought over from England by the early colonists. In the 1830s to 1850s, after farmers over-taxed the rocky Vermont soils, it became common to build a basement under the barn to store manure until it was time to spread on the fields as fertilizer. Siting these barns on slopes, like the Liberty Head Post & Beam barn, made it easy for farmers to access both floors by wagon.
Thomas Visser, a professor of historic preservation at the University of Vermont, is a connoisseur of barns. Their saw marks, nail heads, and timber frames tell him stories. He says his barn fascination grew from digging through piles of junk in his family’s never-been-cleaned barn when he was a child. Eventually, he crafted a way to make sense of the clues he found. He wrote a book about it, so the rest of us can “read” barns, too. “A Field Guide to New England Barns & Farm Buildings,” (University Press of New England, 1997), is a thorough, heavily researched, yet user-friendly guide to what barns mean.
Barns morphed over time and space, accommodating the needs and whims of the people who made a living on the land, market pressures and the land itself.
On Route 15 in Jericho is an L-shaped red barn with large white diamonds on the doors. The offshoot of the L is an English barn, low-ceilinged and small. You can recognize it by its size and its sliding doors on the long, or eaves, side. The main part of the barn, with soaring rafters and sliding doors, is a gable-front barn, descendant of the English barn.
As Vermont farmers cleared the land and harvested nutrients from the soil, it became harder and harder to subsist off of a few wheat and oat fields and a handful of farm animals. In response, farmers enlarged their herds to sell cheese and then butter. In the 1830s, New England farmers adopted the gable-front barn, with the doors on the shorter, or gable, end. This allowed farmers to easily expand the barn as they expanded their herds. This is why many barns in Vermont are jumbles of different kinds of barns stitched together, like the Jericho barn.
Imagine waking up to milk the cows at three on a winter morning, stumbling outside in the wailing snow, with nothing but an oil lantern. The swinging lantern light illuminates huge snowflakes that swirl into your eyes. You stomp through the snow, hoping you are going the right direction, until—there—you see the diamonds glowing faintly white against an otherwise dark barn. You hurry to them, swing a door open and slip inside, into the warm and sudden stillness smelling of hay and animal breath. Barns were trimmed in white in an era when light pollution was unheard of and finding a barn quickly on a dark winter morning was a real concern.
Just north of Huntington Center, dominating the view as Huntington Road rounds a curve, is a behemoth of a barn. White clapboards trimmed in yellow, four stories tall, with a wooden cupola on the roof and windows dotting the sides, is the Jubilee Farm barn. An eye-catching feature of this barn is a projection off its back gable end, a sort of covered bridge from the third floor to the hillside behind. This is what’s called a high drive, and it allows farmers to drive wagons straight into the floors where hay is stored, and then toss it down to the cattle below — much more efficient than hauling it up a bale at a time.
Around 1850, the railroad opened up rapid commerce between the rich farmlands of the Midwest and the cities in the East; with refrigerated railroad cars, cheese and butter could make it to markets in Boston and New York without going bad. Vermont farmers did their best to compete. They specialized in dairy and built bigger barns to accommodate bigger herds. This is when farmers began to build high-drive barns, round barns and monitor barns. Many of Vermont’s barns are variations on the dairy barn theme.
Another barn on Huntington Road in Huntington is a mish-mash, with jumbled outbuildings and milkhouses, and a pole barn at its core. The pole barn is long, single-story, with a concrete floor. There’s no hay storage here, just stalls for cattle.
The pole barn, which became common after the 1940s, is the product of agricultural research on sanitation and efficiency. Farmers learned that they could store hay in the fields, rather than taking up space in the barn. They laid down concrete floors because they were easier to keep clean than earthen or wooden floors. Milk could now be shipped east quickly, and farmers added milkhouses, little shack-like additions, to their barns to keep the milk cool.
Gary Davis’ old barn in Jericho is one of those mish-mashes. He knows part of it was built in 1871—the rest, it’s hard to figure out. But it’s clear it’s a barn. It’s red, trimmed in white. Inside, the cows’ names are written above the stalls. Now the barn collects stuff: piles of kids’ toys, farm implements and snow tires.
Davis, with a weathered, kind face and a salt-and-pepper mustache, stands outside the old barn in olive green waders splattered with mud and cow manure, talking in a gentle voice about dairy farming. He’s frequently interrupted by a mandolin riff in his pocket; he pulls out his cell phone and gives instructions to the field hands who are milking cows across the field. It’s three in the afternoon, and Davis also milks at three in the morning.
What Davis finds most striking about his old barn is that back when it was new it couldn’t have housed more than 20 cows, yet those cows supported the farmer in the big house next door. Now, Davis is struggling to pay bills with a hundred cows, and “that’s an indication that things have changed,” he says.
Davis’ new barns are something else altogether. One is a giant, white, plastic-fabric-wrapped hoop house, squatting in the middle of a muddy field. The other is a wooden greenhouse frame roofed in plastic sheets, with beds of sand lining the aisles. Cows, having been milked, make themselves comfortable on these beds. Between the two barns is a wood-and-plastic milking house, where cows bury their heads in a feed trough while rubber cups are latched onto their teats. Davis and his field hands monitor the milking from a three-foot trough in the center of the building, raising their voices over the rhythmic whir of the milking machines.
Davis says the price of milk “has had, for the past few years, some wild swings,” while the price of everything else just keeps going up. That “makes it hard to plan,” he says.
Nonetheless, Davis is planning. He talks about a free-stall barn, which allows the cows to sleep wherever they like, just as they would in the fields. He’s interested in using compost as bedding instead of sand, because it helps the cows keep warm and could give him some added income. And he wants to help young farmers get started by exchanging cows for work.
In spite of his modern implements, Davis is not much different from Vermont farmers of the past. Vermont farmers have always struggled with a changing market. They’ve always adapted to innovations in technology and efficiency. And they’ve always left a legacy, both in the barns they built and the younger generations they taught. Davis himself is a third-generation farmer.
The stories of Vermont farmers pile up on each other, layering over and over on top of old and new barns, interleaving with the land. You can read these stories if you know what to look for. Visser’s field guide can help.
There comes a moment — maybe it’s standing in a raftered loft, breathing dust motes, maybe it’s wending home on a country road at the end of a day of reading barns, the sun drawing long shadows across the land, when the ground drops away and you’re perched on the very edge of a cliff, the gut-hollowing abyss of time yawing beneath you. This is the moment when you sense the land as a vessel, carrying ghosts and ghost stories, and your life takes its place alongside the farmers and field hands who wrenched a living out of the land, leaving their wooden skeletons, their barns, to slowly tumble down.
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