Bright red barns framed by the sylvan setting of green fields, towering silos and a sprinkling of outbuildings may one day be little more than a picture postcard memory.
Already, some say, those familiar images in the once-rural landscape are vanishing at an alarming rate. So alarming, in fact, that Huntley resident Joyce Perbix, a nature photographer, decided she`d better photograph them before they all disappeared.
”I began with silos as a way to occupy my time during the winter when I wasn`t photographing wildlife. I`ve shot milksheds, windmills, barns, nearly every aspect of farming,” said Perbix, who organized her photographs into a slide presentation she shows to interested groups.
That record may prove to be quite valuable as more and more farmland in Lake, Kane, McHenry and Du Page Counties gives way to subdivisions and shopping centers. Preservationists and farmers agree that the grand old barns may be headed toward museum status unless steps are taken to adapt and preserve the once-common structures.
What`s left in terms of agricultural buildings in Du Page County?
”Not much,” said Chas Raleigh, farm manager for the Klein Creek Farm, a working 1890 farm operated by the Du Page County Forest Preserve District.
Raleigh said Du Page County boasted about 12,000 working farms in 1900;
today, only seven remain.
”This whole area has a tradition of agriculture and family farming. The soil here is incredibly rich and can grow very good crops, yet we have modified the landscape for houses, offices and factories. We`ve lost touch with how this area was developed,” Raleigh said.
The Klein Creek Farm represents a valuable resource to Du Page County residents, said Raleigh, because it depicts a once-common way of life. Klein Creek Farm`s two-fold mission of preservation and education provides a place where area school children can peer into the county`s past as well as learn about food production.
”I`m not sure children have a complete understanding of a complete cycle of a farm,” Raleigh said. ”Unless parents are really concerned about this and drive their kids out to Kane County to look at what farms are doing, this is one of the few places they can (see a farm).”
Raleigh noted that while people may mourn the loss of agricultural land in Du Page County, this evolution is not unique.
”Counties around cities like Los Angeles and New York City have all pretty much had the same development as Du Page. The land that once supported agriculture and livestock is now a suburban area where you`ll see misplaced farmers and find a tremendous increase in the value of land,” Raleigh said.
In Lake County, Rick Bott, a Libertyville general contractor who specializes in moving and restoring historic buildings, recently conducted a survey of barns there.
”At one time Lake County had 2,300 barns. Now there`s less than 150 left. There`s more in McHenry County, but with urbanization they`re rapidly disappearing,” Bott said.
Like Perbix, Bott believes the potential loss of historic farm structures represents more than losing run-down buildings that have outlived their usefulness. Farm buildings and silos paint a picture of the agricultural roots from which the suburbs grew, the loss of which should not be taken lightly.
”Barns are being lost, and they`re a part of the local heritage. The dairy industry was once very prominent in this part of the country, and one way to reflect that is through (preserving) barns,” said Michael Harkin, a director of the Barrington Area Historical Society, which plans to incorporate a 1905 post-and-beam barn into a museum expansion program.
Mike Ashby, general manager of the Du Page County Farm Bureau, said most of the county`s agricultural past has been lost to development.
”We`ve lost a lot of history. Every time a barn goes down, a silo usually goes with it, and that takes away from our heritage,” Ashby said.
Barns and silos vanish from the landscape for a number of reasons, say experts who oversee farming in the region.
While farming still exists, the face of it has changed, said Dale Espel, manager of the Kane County Farm Bureau. Whereas yesterday`s farmers once ran a diverse number of farming operations on their land, today`s farmer specializes.
”It used to be every farm had chickens, horses, cows, hogs and sometimes beef and dairy cows,” explained Espel. ”He had to shelter all those animals and he needed a lot of buildings for different uses. Today a farmer may just have hogs or just do dairy. He only needs one or two buildings.”
Espel said it`s rare to find older farm buildings used for their original purposes. Farmers may adapt some to present-day needs, raze others and build modern structures, or let still others idle.
Espel said farmland in Du Page County has virtually disappeared. In Kane, Lake and McHenry Counties, the acreage of productive farmland dwindles as farmers sell and subdivide their land and retire.
Active farmers number less than 900 in Kane County whereas 20 years ago more than 1,100 farmers worked the land, Espel said. Larry Harris, manager of the McHenry County Farm Bureau, estimates McHenry County loses each year more than 3,000 acres of productive farmland to shopping centers and housing developments.
”My grandchildren are 1 and 3 years old,” Harris said. ”If things continue at this rate, by the time they`re teenagers there won`t be any resemblance of agriculture. What little is left now will be gone.”
Adapting barns to modern-day uses is one way to preserve historic farm structures, and examples of such preservation work are becoming more prevalent in the northwest area.
Of the historic settlement buildings that contractor Bott has moved and re-erected, including log cabins and early churches, post-and-beam barns that date to the 1800s are a favorite. He maintains an inventory of historic barns in the Midwest that are in good condition and could be dismantled and moved.
”The barns built between 1850 and 1890 are the best built barns because the quality of the timber in Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois was so outstanding,” Bott explained.
Also during that time the Midwest experienced a wave of German, Norwegian and Swedish immigrants who were skilled in carpentry.
”These people must have thought they`d died and gone to heaven when they got here and found this land. That combination of some of the finest timber in the Midwest with that group of hardworking and skilled people produced quality barns,” Bott said.
Since post-and-beam barns were constructed without nails, the parts can be disassembled, numbered and erected at another site. Bott designs homes that incorporate the historic barn structure according to his clients needs, which frequently means a new home.
He says the cost of adapting a barn to modern-day living is competitive with new housing costs in the area.
”We have an old-fashioned barn-raising just the way they did it 130 years ago,” Bott explained. ”Then we wrap the barn building with a conventional shell of wiring, insulation and plumbing. We try to save all the esthetic beauty of the old barns and timber and at the same time build as practical a house as we can.”
In seeking to uncover examples of preserving historic farm structures, the Kane County Farm Bureau and the Kane County Historic Preservation Commission jointly sponsored a county competition they dubbed ”That Darn Barn.”
Christine Poll, preservation planner for the county, said the idea emerged as a way to blend the preservation with the reality of farming.
”We wanted to make people aware of the fact that these buildings can still be maintained or adapted to other uses, agricultural or not, in order to keep them in the landscape,” Poll said.
The contest produced nine entries, including a dairy barn that the owner had converted to a hog nursery.
When Ronald Hartman, a longtime Elgin-area farmer, found his dairy farming no longer profitable, he cast about for another farming operation.
”There weren`t that many things I could have done, but I`ve always had a few hogs. I had an engineer come out and look at my dairy barn to see if it could be converted to a hog nursery. It was in great shape, so I did it,”
Hartman said.
That was 1971, and the conversion cost $30,000 versus the $100,000 he would have had to invest in his dairy business to make it more profitable.
Hartman said the bottom line often works against farmers who might want to preserve their farm structures but can`t.
”Some of this is insurance. It`s about impossible to get (affordable)
insurance for a barn that`s unique and made out of wood,” Hartman said.
”Nobody wants to do it for what it`s really worth. And most of the farmers` kids aren`t staying on the farm anymore. That makes it tough to preserve it and carry it on. If Mom and Dad are in their 70s, and they can`t get insurance, and they don`t have any kin, who`s going to buy the place?”
Chances are it won`t be a farmer. That`s when farm land becomes real estate, and investors pick up land to turn a profit.
A cluster of a dozen silos now anchors the southeastern corner of McHenry County just south of Crystal Lake on Randall Road. The silos once held silage for one of the biggest dairy operations in the area, where up to 300 cows were milked daily.
The cows are gone now, most of the farm has been sold to a developer, and a new subdivision shares the landscape with the silos.
”It`s almost a certainty that those (silos) are destined to go,” said photographer Perbix. ”But that`s what`s happening. The rural buildings are disappearing at an alarming rate. It`s disturbing to go out and see barns I once photographed that are now gone. A number of barns I did 10 years ago are gone.”
Silos are particularly important to McHenry County since several agricultural experts believe the structures originated there, though none could provide proof. Perbix has emphasized silos in her photography because of their place in the county`s history.
”I`m attempting to find all varieties of silos used in McHenry County. But they`re disappearing, too,” Perbix said. ”Two wooden silos I shot are gone now. Another one caved in. One wooden silo got too dangerous to leave up and had to be torn down.”
When silos go, barns often follow. But one particularly grand barn has survived the wrecking ball that demolished its companion farm house and silo: the famous round Teeple barn, located in the Randall Road corridor west of Elgin where office research complexes have begun to sprout from fields that once hosted corn and cows. The rare structure is one of seven barns in Kane County that have earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.
”It`s an incredible building. It`s mind-boggling,” said Bott. ”This barn was built in a grand scale by someone who must have been extremely wealthy. It`s incredible that somebody could build something like this because if defies all the rules of engineering I know.”
Bott describes standing in the interior of the 1885 barn as similar to standing in the rotunda of a state Capitol. The balloon frame spans 85 feet without support.
The barn stands on property now owned by an electronics manufacturing firm, Matsushita Electric Industrial Ltd., which is building its regional headquarters on the site. Right now the barn stands fenced off from the construction site. While company officials have said they plan to integrate the barn into its office campus, a specific use for the structure has yet to be announced.
Preservationists believe people are becoming more sensitive to the importance of saving and recycling historic structures.
Michael Harkin of the Barrington Area Historical Society said the preservation of farm structures has been overlooked in the area. The historical society`s choice of using a barn to house its growing collections means the building itself can become an exhibit, too.
”There is a need (for preserving something in the area that represents our collective memories and our culture,” Harkin said. ”The construction of the barn itself with all its pegs and no nails is an art in itself. It`s important to interpret and share that kind of craftsmanship.”
