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.