Timber Framers Guild Forums General This Old Building help identify this barn, possibly a kit?

I just acquired a barn that has to be removed. It is 40x72. It seems to be a dairy barn. Its sitting on 42" tall concrete walls. It is 38 to 40 feet tall at the peak. The interesting thing is that all the beams joints are stamped with roman numerals. Almost like it was a boughten kit. Has anyone seen this before? Thanks

one of many ancient and honorable systems used by timberframers to identify each stick before erection and/or before deconstruction. ensures the proper stick is going into the proper location. there are many variants on the numbering used.

Do you think it is more likely that it was assembled this way or it could have been marked, taken down, moved and reassembled. Are a lot of barns built on top off concrete walls. This one has 4' 7" high concrete walls.

This wasn't uncommon in the old days. My wife and I are living in an old farmhouse Circa 1784 the rafters are marked with roman numeral numbers. The numbers pair up the correct timbers. The house has never been moved (based on historical records and photos of the house).

Get out your magnifying glass and carefully examine the markings paying close attention to the inside surfaces of the characters. Does it appear the aging within the letters is the same as the timber surface adjacent or does it look like the numbers were added post construction ?
Old barns were rarely set on stub walls. Your hypothesis that the barn was reassembled on a modern foundation may have some merit.

Dairy Regs forced multiple schemes in retrofitting barns in the name of sanitation, minimizing dust and fighting the spread of Bovine tuberculosis. This often went way beyond the whitewashing we see so often in historical barns, and often involved concrete, sometimes this went so far as to replacing entire lower stories with crete incarnations.

If moved it may have been simply, strait up.

I’m also guessing your in a State which was a colony formerly ?

Probably not a kit a kit as such , but sears and roebuck did offer some of the first packages that were like a kit with pre manufactured components. First determine the age by looking to see if the beams are hewn (older than 1900) or sawn. Hewn barns were asseble or dry fit then disassembled and stacked until all components where ready. Then a date was set for raising and the call went out and they raise it in a day usually. The marks where reference or "witness" marks to tell what mortice went with which tenon. Barns where usually built on site, (cause thats where the logs were), but if the logs wre elseware they could have been pre-fab off site. As for the cement foundation many old(hewn) barns where elavated (or moved and elavated)to accomadate dairies. If its hewn, with cement base, one of these things probably happened. If sawn, it may be all origanal. I also heard there where companies in the early 1900's making pre fab timber barns, usually engineered structures consisting of smaller 8x8 timbers, short in length and often very large buildings.