Swing Beam

I just looked at an old barn (1830's)this week. Originally I was told that it was a
3-bay Dutch barn ,upon seeing the barn I asked again and was told 3-Bay English Threshing Barn . Inside ,to the right of the door was a massive hewn oak Swing Beam runnig
paralell to and 5' below the tie beam spaning the width of the barn (30')
In the book Old Barns in the New World by
Richard Babcock this type of barn is called a German Barn but in The Old Barn Book, a field guide to North American Barns by Noble & Cleek the barn is called a variant of an English Three-Bay Threshing Barn.
Who built barns with Swing Beams ? Since
the engineering forum is acting like lawers,
I shall treat the historians as doctors and
ask for a third opinion.

Tom,

Your question is a good one, but difficult to answer accurately. Most of the work that has been done to document and categorize the barns of America is conjectural at best. Although it is possible to classify barns according to types and forms which indicate their origin, the truth is barns are utility buildings built for farmers by American carpenters.

John MacNamara of the "hidden mountains" area of upstate Pennsylvania is a one of many strong voices currently asking for a broader range of categories which includes Ameriacn barns and their variants. He's probably right.

I recently enjoyed a conversation with Bob Ensminger (The Pennsylvania Barn, Johns Hopkins Press) and asked him this question (yours). He is not aware of the swing beam existing in any barns he has visited in the old world. He further hesitated to categorize the swing beam barn as German, Dutch or English.

He did bring up an interesting point in reference to your historian's mistaken identification. It would appear that many people fail to differentiate between the Dutch barn (imigrants from Holland and the Netherlands) and the Duetch barn (imigrants from Germany and Switzerland). Geographically these areas are not very far apart, but there is a great difference in the barns they built and the vestages of them we see in our historic agricultural architecture.