Vermont tries to keep historic Vt. barns alive
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By BRIAN MACQUARRIE The Boston Globe - Published: November 15, 2008
CORNWALL — A raw, cold rain lashes Glen Dale Farm, a 230-year-old spread nestled on a gentle rise in the Champlain Valley between the Green Mountains and the Adirondacks.
Gray, weathered clapboards are bowed and bent on some of its barns, beaten by exposure and age into scraps of twisted sheathing. Sloping roofs are gouged with holes where wooden shingles once repelled the elements. And planks hacked from the forest more than a century ago have turned to crumbling rot.
This farm has plenty of company. In a state renowned for its bucolic image, the iconic barns that help draw droves of tourists are vanishing along with the farms that needed them. Just after World War II, the state was home to 24,000 farms, each with at least one barn. Today, 6,200 farms remain that produce more than $1,000 in annual income, according to state data.
Now the state is making a unique effort to stop the decline. Inside the oldest Glen Dale barn, Nancy Boone, the state architectural historian, jots down notes about its condition, style, framing, and myriad other features during a visit last month. The task is part of an unprecedented census, which Boone helped launch, to locate and catalog Vermont barns more than 50 years old from the Massachusetts border to the Northeast Kingdom.
No one knows exactly how many barns are left, only that they are disappearing rapidly. The steep decline in family farms, coupled with the staggering cost of maintaining old barns, has led to inescapable ruin for many of them.
"I think that people tend to feel their loss may be inevitable," Boone said. "The information we have about barns in most areas of the state is virtually nonexistent."
The estimates of the number of Vermont's remaining barns vary wildly. Some officials say there are 20,000; others believe as few as 5,000.
Glen Dale Farm, for all its scars, is a success story. Thanks to caring owners and a first-in-the-nation program that provides state grants for barn preservation, the four barns at Glen Dale are making a slow but determined comeback. The flooring has been replaced on the English barn from 1780, the roof has been rebuilt, and the badly sagging southeast corner has been repaired.
Thousands of other farm buildings throughout Vermont have not been as fortunate.
The idea for a census received a kick-start after the Valentine's Day storm in 2007, when many barns across the state collapsed under the crushing weight of heavy snow. Boone applied to the federal government for financial help, and the state received a $150,000 matching grant through the Preserve America program of the National Park Service.
The census information, collected by volunteers, will be logged on a state Web site, where a map will show all the barns and farm structures as they are identified, from chicken coops to ash houses to mink sheds and corn cribs. The data will be only a baseline, but Boone and others hope the census will increase awareness and serve as a catalyst for innovative ideas in preservation.
Similar discussions are under way across the nation, where the alarming loss of barns has concerned officials like Jim Lindberg of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
"They're a symbol of our natural and agricultural past. We were a nation of farmers for generations," said Lindberg, who directs preservation initiatives in the Mountains and Plains region for the National Trust. ''They also are beautiful and have qualities that people appreciate as structures, as monuments, as icons, and as pieces of great architecture.
"And they just have simple utility as resources that people shouldn't be throwing away."
To Boone, the census is more than a catalog of nostalgia. The economic benefits of future tourism are obvious, she said. But the preservation of the special "feel" of Vermont is important to the people who live here.
"The history and the character of Vermont is really wrapped up in these historic agricultural buildings," Boone said. "When you travel around Vermont, you see incredible natural beauty. But within that beauty is 200 years of agricultural history."
What sets Vermont apart, Boone said, is that many of its farms remain in their original setting. A small population in Vermont, limited development, and only incremental changes mean that what one sees from the road today is what one has seen for decades and sometimes centuries.
"People here have a familiarity and a comfort in feeling part of a tradition of place," Boone said. "You feel the history that has come before, you're part of the history, and your children will be part of the history."
At Glen Dale Farm, owner Jack Watts escorted Boone to his English barn from the Revolutionary War, to the 1840 sheep barn, and to the livestock and carriage barns from 1870. His pride in the place is palpable.
"You should have been here 15 years ago," said Watts, shaking his head at the memory of their dilapidated condition. Since the early 1990s, Watts and his wife, Judy, have received about $18,000 in matching state grants to stabilize the barns. They also have spent about $75,000 of their own money.
"It was kind of an evolution, but we grew to appreciate the barns," said Watts, particularly after seeing an 1876 illustration of the farm that bore a striking resemblance to the present-day property.
When a neighbor who owned three of the barns announced plans to demolish them, Watts and his wife were shocked into action.
They accepted ownership of the buildings and planned to preserve the buildings, which reflect changes in Vermont agriculture from the subsistence farming of the earliest white settlers, to the local 19th-century boom in Merino sheep, to the later preference for dairy farming.
Now, as in the past, the old English barn — named for the style transplanted from Britain — retains an occasional social function. Auctions are held there periodically, and Watts's daughter, Alexis, was married in the barn in 2002.
The barns also enhance a setting with spectacular mountain views just west of Middlebury. A neighbor cut a window in his bathroom so he could gaze at the barns while otherwise engaged. And Woody Jackson, the painter whose black-and-white Holstein cows adorn Ben & Jerry ice cream containers, has included the barns in some works.
In addition to aesthetics, the old barns in Vermont and elsewhere will be useful as nationwide interest in small-scale sustainable farming continues to grow, said Lindberg. Where some tourists see a tumbledown remnant of the horse-drawn past, Lindberg sees converted homes, shops, restaurants, and storage space.
Such adaptation would be welcome in Vermont, where barns are as much a part of the state as maple syrup, skiing, and white, wooden churches.
"They're not just wood and stone," Boone said. "They're about history, and they're about the life that happened inside them."
To Jack Watts, they're also part of his home.
"Hopefully," he said, "they'll stay around for another 100 years."
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