Bob -- The complete and pervasive economic upheaval in the south coupled with the loss of a significant percentage of 18-30 year old males could have been enough to keep conditions fairly poor for a generation. Meaning no farm expansion. It's one thing to be back to operating at capacity in a few years and another thing to be doing so well you can build new infrastructure.


Alternatively, it could be that the original barns which may have all been built in a 20-30 year window were all just plain used up by that time and no longer worth repairing/adding on to/converting for different agricultural techniques and technologies (hay tracks, etc). So people built new ones.

Well, I can believe that the barns are part of the recovering economy of the south, but I still wonder what was built in the forty years after the Civil War. As I mentioned, I can find no evidence of reused materials in these "new" barns. Even if the farms had thrown something up to tide them over, I would expect to see some of that material in these barns.

Most of them are on farms dating from theBorden Land Grant(toward the end of the 17 hundreds) and in almost all cases, the houses are older than the barns. When I began my survey, I started with VDH surveys of the oldest properties in the county. As I noted either "frame barn" or "bank barn" on the survey, I set that property aside. Most of the surveys were done in the late 80's to early 90's and a good number of the barns were gone. Another goodly amount were stick built outbuildings and not really barns at all. I quickly larned that whoever was doing the surveys cared litle to nothing about the barns.

As to the joists on the "new" barns, they are mainly sawn 3 by 8 to 10 relatively closely spaced; and not tapered. On some, as I mentioned they are apparently recycled log structure parts. Sometimes the barns are on older foundations, sometimes on slip-formed concrete. When on older,stone foundations,there is usuallly a cementitious parging applied and sometimes a newer concrete foundation in front of the stone(on the bank side).

Judgingfrom other contemporary construction, I don't think size was an issue. I can say that while most of these barns are oak, we have done a lot of restoration on barns north of here that are almost entirely pine.

Finding no answers, just more questions.

That's all possible. I would feel better if I could find some supporting documentation - either way. I started these surveys for a class I'm taking at James Madison University, but am really feeling out of my depth on explaining what I am finding.

I can describe the barn: how it was built, when it was built, materials, even purpose to a degree. I would like to find a more complete explanation of why it was built when it was built.

A 40 year period is really a short period of time. A generation, 20-25 years, I am two generations old. If I look back through my life a lot has happened but the surrounding land scape, buildings included has changed little. The houses that were built in the 60's have change little as well. We are approaching changes that will be more noticeable.

I suspect you may be looking too hard for a reason these newer building exist. If you applied the information you do have to a timeline, frame types and such, along with habits of the people, farming info, other aspects economies and such, what picture develops?

Bob, is it possible these barns replaced log barns and those joists come from those?

It's possible, but log (crib) barns in this area tend to have central log cribs with rough framed aisles and vertical sheathing. There is little joinery in the barn cribs themselves (joist notches, window and door lets). A good number of the joistsin these newer barns have too much joinery for me to think they came from barns.

Also, the research I've done suggests that preference in barn and home typology tends to be ethnographic. So without a change in ownership, I would almost expect barn replacement to follow type.There are in fact quite a few log structures in the county that post date the Civil War. You do raise an interesting polint, though. I imagine there was a lot of propertnoty changing hands after the War. This might explain some of what I see, but not all of it. As I mentioned, some of these properties have been in the same family since the original land grant. Again, intermarrying might address some of that. Looks like I'm leaving the barns and heading to the courthouse. That should be a little cleaner.

Just did a quick bit of reading. Looks like Gen Sheridan burned a lot of barns in the valley in 1864. It takes two generations at least to come back from losing everything but the land. I can't explain why they would frame with timber so late, though.

Yes. That is my question.

On a related note, it seems that post war surveys indicated that Sheridan's accounts were optimistic. In some instances, he burned more structures than existed.

Some things don't change.

As I stated in an early post, barns were being built of timber right up to the 20's in Indiana, despite the fact that balloon framing comes from nearby Chicago. Most of our barns come from roughly the same time period described here, and are built of both hewn and sawn timber. I can go up the road from my house to a nice big timber barn with the year 1914 posted in big white numbers on one end, because that was the year it was built. Right behind my house sits an old timber barn that county records show was built in 1910. These barns are by no means unique.

In our area, the oldest barns seem to be bank barns and forebay barns, some built by the Amish and the other by other settlers from Ohio and Pennsylvania, while all the newer tend to be the box 'midwestern' type barn. Dairy barns are not always TF, but sometimes are.

For us, a 100 year old building is old, because there just aren't very many surviving that are any older. The oldest buildings are about 150 years old.

There are actually a surprising number of log cabins all around us too, but you wouldn't know it to look at them. Many of them are boarded over and made to look like more comfortable modern houses, or incorporated into a larger expanded structure. The romantic image of log cabins you see did not exist before very very recent times. Here log cabins were a temporary means, something you threw up to stay in before you could build a real house. Which you did as soon as you could possibly manage.