Growing up on a dairy farm on Hardy Hill in Lebanon, John Porter spent a lot of time in barns, and over a long career as a University of New Hampshire Extension dairy specialist he would spend countless hours in hundreds of barns throughout the state and on many other farms all over the Northeast and Upper Midwest. Porter, you see, is both an expert on agricultural buildings and a true lover of barns of all kinds and their histories.
Now Porter is out with a second, updated edition of his book on barns, a 144-page volume titled Preserving Old Barns: Preventing the Loss of a Valuable Resource. It was written in collaboration with Francis Gilman, a longtime UNH agricultural engineer who died last year, and includes beautiful illustrations by a Connecticut-based clergyman-photographer, Lowell Fewster. And to give credit where credit is due, it was edited and designed by Deirdre Randall of the Portsmouth-based publisher of many New England-focused books and town histories, Peter E. Randall Publisher. (In the interest of full disclosure, I wrote a blurb for the book.)
Preservation of New Hampshire’s fast-disappearing stock of historic barns is a cause that caught on in the late 1990s, when advocates convinced a skeptical Legislature to establish by law a state committee to coordinate barn preservation efforts. Legislation soon followed to provide tax stabilization for preserved barns and the beginning of a modest grant program to aid owners in assessing ways to save their structures. And with all this came an initiative to create a guidebook on the subject, a task assigned to Porter and Gilman.
Everyone involved in these efforts was astonished at the success of the 2001 guidebook, which had a second printing to meet demand. Over another decade, Porter and Gilman by fits and starts assembled material for a second volume and eventually drew in Fewster, who already had a vast file of photos of outstanding examples of New Hampshire farm buildings.
Their product is much more than another volume on barn history, however. They dig into the why of barn construction, relating it to both the contemporary methods of construction and the economic conditions prevailing when the structures were created. Each period has its peculiarities — hand-hewn, up-and-down or circular sawed; pegs or spikes; shingles, slate or metal; pine, hemlock or hardwood; subsistence farming, sheep, dairy, poultry or mixed use.
“English” barns prevailed until about 1830, typically about 30 by 40 feet, with a main door in the center under the eaves. But then came “Yankee” barns, bigger with doors on the gable ends to avoid the snow and ice falling off the eaves. And into the 20th century new technologies and management methods would continually dictate fresh approaches to barn design, Porter’s book explains.
These evolutionary changes were often unkind to existing structures, for while new construction would refresh the stock of barns, disuse, deferred maintenance, fire and other calamities continue to claim older barns. Porter emphasizes maintaining roofs and foundations as the critical part of barn preservation, and the book offers plenty of technical advice.
The book also offers a critical point, one that Porter always makes when doing one of his numerous lectures on barn preservation. That is that most preservation initiatives will fail unless there’s a new use for the structure when the work is done. Maybe it’s another kind of agriculture, a workshop, a retail store, a brewery or even housing, something should be there to make use of the space.
Preserving Old Barns documents examples of fine restorations and loving care accorded barns in scattered parts of New Hampshire. Upper Valley barns in Claremont, Cornish, Lyme and Orford make the list prominently, along with the barns on Porter’s ancestral farm off Stevens Road in Lebanon.
Steve Taylor lives and farms in Meriden.
