BFE Reporter Monday

BFE REPORTER MONDAY

They Don't Build Them Like They Used To

This is what folks call a barn now. We always called hem a machine shed. A barn was meant for livestock. A place for horses after a long day pulling a plow in the field. A feedlot in the back for the cattle. Shelter for them from the snow and rain. A granary for the oats and corn. A loft for the hay. A special place for that 4-H bottle calf, steer or show pony. A huge wooden structure built by men and women with calloused hands on the unforgiving prairie.

A barn like this one. It belongs to Jane Beringer Moody. I worked in that barn during my teen years stacking hundreds of bales of hay for her father Wallace. If you look at the cupola the barn was built in 1909.

This barn a scant half mile down the road from the one pictured above has stood the test of time since 1880. It stands proudly on the farm owned by Angela Rommel.

I never imagined that anyone in our area would build true barn in my lifetime. Cows and pigs are the prisoners of our time now relegated to structures we call confinement. A barn doesn't work for that. Horses have almost disappeared from the area replaced by mechanical beasts with hundreds of horses powering their wheels from their steel engines.

Then one day driving down Swanson Seed Farm Road the structure below was rising from the ashes of our history.

A real barn. A structure of wood built with hands and hammers.

While the tools used are different from those that built the barn of the 1880's or 1909, the craftsmanship live on in the skill of the carpenter.

This is the barn today, February 8, 2013. Still a work in progress but she will be a beauty.

Unfortunately, too many barns look like the ones below ravaged by the weather and years of neglect.

I hope she gets the love and attention these barns were denied. Perhaps in a hundred years or so someone will look at her and say, "They don't build them like that now."

Todays contribution comes from Jeff Sutor, author of Bodine-DILLIGAF, of BFE Wataga. Thanks Jeff.

If you have anything please send it to bfereporter@yahoo.com.

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