Chas Raleigh was thinking about barns the other day, trying to count how many he knew were still in DuPage County.
He walked outside and realized he had forgotten about the one in his neighbor’s back yard. He sees it all the time but looks right past it.
How many of us do notice barns anymore? It’s almost as if they’re becoming invisible as subdivisions and corporate parks go up around them.
A numbered few are still there, but we don’t always see them. They are starting to fade from our sight as mysterious remnants of a former age, when farming in DuPage County was king. The sole remaining working farm in the county is Kline Creek, a living history 1890s museum. But scattered barns still remain.
Stop to examine the inside of a great 19th Century barn, though, and looking at them will never be the same.
Raleigh, site manager at Kline Creek, stands beneath the soaring beams of the 1880s structure at the museum in West Chicago.
Immense hand-hewn timbers, 8 inches by 8 inches, made of white pine probably hauled down from Wisconsin or Michigan, rise from a limestone foundation to support the simple peaked shed-style roof.
Although this barn, with 1,700 square feet, is probably slightly smaller than those typical of its style, its spaciousness is staggering. The entire framed area is actually the loft, designed to store the hay, straw and grain for feed and bedding for the animals.
Two square structures inside that rise up are chutes that make it easy to drop the hay through a trap door to feed the animals below. In fact, some sheep in pens mill about there, curious about the noise of strangers above.
Raleigh explains that the construction of this barn is what is called post and beam. Typically, this kind of structure was built using no nails, just connecting the mortise and tenon beams with pegs.
“My dad was 8 years old when his dad built a barn, and he remembers spending around three months whittling the pegs for it,” Raleigh said.
Huge timbers are joined into a structure called a bent, which are the support of the barn. There are four bents in this barn, lined up parallel to one another. The spaces between them are called the bays. So this is a four-bent, three-bay barn.
In the 19th Century, roving workers would usually build the bents.
“They probably spent about three months preassembling the bents for this barn and stacking them,” Raleigh said. Then neighbors would come in for a barn raising, and the bents would be set in place and connected together with girts (the timbers that run horizontally around the barn to hold it together) in just one day. The farmer, or the contractor, would finish siding and roofing the barn.
After the turn of the century, most farmers began using the balloon type of construction, typical of homes built today, where the structural support is in the outside walls. Roof styles also changed from shed-style peaked roofs to gambrel roofs (three-peaked, or curved-top roofs) to allow for more storage space for the grain.
A good example of a hybrid of these two styles is the Hahn barn, a big, beautiful white barn at Mallard Lake Forest Preserve near Bloomingdale.
“It is probably one of the most significant barns in DuPage,” said Raleigh, who wrote a memo to the forest preserve district officials requesting them to save the structure when there was talk of tearing it down.
It is built in post and beam construction with a gambrel roof, but the solidly built floor uses massive 3-inch by 12-inch floor joists placed about 12 inches apart. It has a concrete floor, which was a new technology at that time. The siding on the outside is board and batten, meaning vertical boards are fastened together with a narrow strip of wood that keeps rain and wind from entering.
On a tour of DuPage County, Raleigh pointed out a typical three-sided 1950s-era barn that was used in livestock production but now stores equipment at the Danada Forest Preserve. Also at that site are two horse barns, one built around 1930 with elegant wainscoting inside and schiplap (horizontal) tongue and groove siding outside. The other barn is a Kentucky-style horse barn probably built also in the 1930s. It is very long and wide with stalls inside and a steep roof that flattens toward the edges. The hay storage is located in the middle of the upper area under the steep portion of the roof.
Non-orthogonal (round, or octagonal) barns demonstrate yet another style. Examples of this style still abound in Kane County, including the 16-sided Teeple Barn in northwest Elgin, which is being remodeled for use as an agricultural center. It exemplifies the motto of many barn preservationists: adaptive reuse.
“Our biggest challenge is to continue to use barns as agricultural practices change and they can no longer be used for their original function,” said Mark VanKerkoff, preservationist and community planner for the Kane County Development Department.
Kane County is aggressively trying to educate farmers in new ways to use their barns in order to save them from being torn down.
“Farmers are running a business, and to get them to maintain buildings they’re not using is a challenge. There’s not a lot of incentive for them to do that,” he said. “We need to show them other ways they can use the building so that it makes sense to continue to put money into it.”
For example, Ron and Pat Hartmann of Plato Township adapted their dairy barn for hog farming, and in the process earned an award in 1992 from Kane County’s That Darned Barn program and the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Barn Again! programs, both developed to recognize barn preservation.
“Our barn is the centerpiece of our farm,” said Pat Hartmann. “It’s a grand barn, 125 feet long in the classic gambrel style.”
The Hartmanns kept the exterior of the barn the same but tore out the center concrete and stanchions used for cattle, built new pens for the hogs and put in a heated floor as well as new ventilation and feeding systems.
“We didn’t want to build a new barn because the old one was so beautiful,” she said.
Other practical reuses of an old barn, VanKerkoff said, are to convert a dairy barn to a horse barn or for storage of equipment.
“Sometimes that presents a challenge,” VanKerkoff said, “because the barn doors may not be big enough in the lower level to fit modern equipment inside, so sometimes changes have to be made.”
VanKerkoff also tries to persuade farmers to keep their barns because doing so is economically a good idea. “Their property may be more valuable if the barn is still in good shape and can be adapted,” he said.
Kane County is also encouraging developers to adapt the barns at the eastern edge of its borders where there is lots of residential growth. Some smaller ones can be remodeled for residential use, some are being used as farmers markets, and some developers are turning them into community centers. The Fine Line near St. Charles is an arts and crafts center within a barn.
Fox Mill, a new residential development west of St. Charles, is having one barn on its property dismantled and set up somewhere else, and it is conserving another barn that may be used as a fitness, recreational or arts and crafts center.
“We think it’s a good thing to keep the barn because it gives rural character to the setting, which is nice,” said George Inslee, director of operations for Fox Mill.
“I wish that developers, corporations and private individuals would take more of an interest in saving these buildings,” Raleigh said. “They usually don’t, and as a result, government has to do it. But government, of course, can’t afford to save all of them, it’s just too expensive.
“We can’t save them all. We have torn down a lot that I wish we hadn’t, but then again, it’s not necessarily the forest preserve’s mission. Our reason for being is to conserve and provide open space. Our administration has strong beliefs that if you preserve a structure, you have to take care of it and maintain a safe perimeter around it, and that’s very costly to do. There’s just a limit to our resources.”
There is a national movement under way to preserve barns, said VanKerkoff: “I was recently at a round table discussion held by the Midwest regional office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The one interesting thing to me that came out of that meeting is that other states and groups like Kane County have had activities for barn preservation, and they’re attracting people from all walks of life. They told of people’s love affairs with barns and the need for them to be preserved and saved.”
H. Wayne Price of Springfield, who wrote a chapter for the recent book “Barns of the Midwest” (Ohio University Press, 1995), said, “The barn represents our heritage of our agrarian past. Even today most people can claim some association in their background with farm life either through direct family connections or friends, and there seems to be a certain pride in that.”
Price, like others, believes as much as possible should be done to save the barns we have left.
“Lots of people don’t notice a barn until it’s gone,” VanKerkoff agreed. “They’ll say, `Whatever happened to that barn? We used to love looking at it.’ “
