them then he's very willing to answer questions and i'm following that we have a freshman and following the refreshment we have a business meeting for the members of the society that they agenda for the for them i want to mention however one more event that sept coming on may seventh our history barn which some of you might have seen  when you drove him tonight which is directly behind the town hall across the parking lot has been holding monthly open which is in may may seventh i think it is there will be a quilt show at the history bar from nine to noon on saturday may seventh and all local quilters all kinds of excellent craftsmanship and you are invited to come and take a  look if you will keep your eyes peeled on the newspapers because we do have monthly programs for some of the open houses including a special open house in november to honor our that trip but keep your so and make it worthwhile we've kept the barn open throughout the winter on some pretty cold days  perkins referring to by some as dr perkins said i didn't know that i would have made the poster differently but some of you may have read is articles in the newspaper that he has written both support thanks lenny it's great to be here in new gloucester the first bard ever wrote about was here and of last year it was the wilcox's place with the pumpkin farm and they here tonight  anyway it's great to be here because this is serious byron country new gloucester is very unique i live right in raymond and how fortunate am i to have new gloucester right next door i love to come i come up the gloucester hill road usually when i come i love as you crest the hill by opportunity farm you just look off to the right and you see see barns sprouting you know amidst the acreage and as you may remember i did write that series back in two thousand and seven eight and did you folks get it mailed to you that paper the because i know grey oh something starting here ok great well anyway i knew a little bit about barnes then i know a heck of a lot more now i have a background in carpentry and woodworking and i was always interested in the old time which brought me to write about barnes they say write about what you know so for that paper i always did a series on something you know i did old cars for a while i did tractors i did woodworkers and i was looking for another series and i thought barnes might be something but i really didn't know if it would be of any interest or or whatever but i found it to be very interesting and i found it to be a very vast subject  england so tonight i'm going to talk a lot about england i'm going to talk about diverse things such as the dairy industry they all connect with barns so without further ado sagna is going to drive and so far to begin here i've just got about fifty or so pictures of barns in the surrounding area and just get us in the mood in the barn mood so maybe you could just advance one second a piece until you get to the headstone that's new gloucester that's the pierces place that's new gloucester hold it right there for a minute is that barn still standing i went looking for that the other day i couldn't find it please be thinking of questions i have a question session at the end that's great that's north yarm norway maine my in laws rep in the county so that's new gloucester that's oxford greenwood again everybody see new gloucester c there's one in oxford that once no longer with us that's the one in oxford no longer with us really new gloucester grey the shakers gloucester shakers shakers shakers gloucester new gloucester ok i love that how to find somebody put a bar on their family's headstone that's very unusual i would say i was glad to get to have seen that ok so let's get going next first of all barn what is the word barn most announce a very old middle english term from barley and house next means barley house barley store and that's why barn and barley share a common spelling originally barns were for grain they weren't for livestock at all nick and the word barn didn't always mean a building and i've been reading some things that come across the word barn and used in a totally different context in the building next to this is a something from a book when we had gathere corn and dried it we put it into indian barns that is into holes in the ground lined and covered with bark and then with dirt so if you see me a storehouse or just a place to store grain next and interestingly it is said you will not find barns outside the european sold areas the world you will not find them in africa or peru or and that's  because of our climate you need us somewhere to shelter harvest the animals the agricultural practices and europeans were not nomadic people they put down roots and like to have some shelter next so one of the main farming looks like in the early days when people did not come here to farm but to lumber and fish this is not good farm country guy and after a while the  new englanders could no longer ignore that farm when the west got opened up the breadbasket except for a this is rocky soil this is a short growing season this is great grazing land great pasture land but it's not it's not great farmland so new englanders had it hard right from the get go next early livestock fed on brows basically chose the trees and thought of that was just wild and they had no barn to seek protection from storms bears or wolves next and the early barn is perhaps just a crib of logs or a straw covered lean to and it's too bad that the french and indian wars in the seven hundred fifty s burned a lot of our original barns especially in this area this was considered the hinterlands back then stuff around portland and found with became well defended and pretty well preserved but you get out on the outskirts most everything which is burned next and this was interesting a few horses in maine before the revolution oxen did most of the labor and their cross section of the frame and these can be built many many many different configurations next in the pieces are fastened with a morris intended this is the tenant the whole is the mor and this is old stuff folks this is old stuff the pyramids when they were building the pyramids these to haul the stones on sleds and those sleds were made with morrison ten and join that's been found in archaeological stuff next so our first barnes because this was new england and because most every family that came here was from england we have english barns our first barn were english barns and that is defined by the main entrance on eaves not on the end but here on the eaves right in the center and that was because there was design for the threshing of grain the farmer would spread his grain out on the floor in the threshing floor beat it with a flail get the husk off that put it in a big disk like basket throw it up to the wind and the heavier we would sink in the chaff would blow away so they wanted the door here with another around the back so that the wind would blow through the smallest dimension of the building ok next and here we have a cause ridge road we have a barn in that style but this is not really an accurate english barn the spine is not particularly very old an english pine would not have been built on this kind of a slope configuration english barns had no basement typically and they were just built on the ground next here's another one that the antique shop on twenty six and grey really nice preserved english barn and you see there little bit small english barns a kind of small there were no private barns typically barn was was an ag was a civic building more than a private building and the harvest got stored in the community barn this is the oldest barn on the face of the earth guy anybody want to take a guess what century close eleven twelve ten twelve ten a d this is the barley barn and this is the wheat barn this is about one hundred by forty and took four hundred eighty oak trees to build and it was built by the knights templar and the order of the knights templar in essex england but is still standing today and we have what's remarkable is we have examples of the same kind of joinery over here in new gloucester next this is a barn in norway ok this is called the english tying joint because it ties the building together  you've got this post it's kind of a flared post starts out square and it tapers as you go up and it's not just here for this long top plate and the cross ties on top with the old post because it flares and it was brilliant the carpenters took advantage of it of a taper of a tree next to the butt end of the tree it would be inverted to be the top of the post because the  tree is naturally wider at the but they would just invert it and they would have that tapered post now this is a couple of different configurations that most of the barns around here are built with this is the traditional english tieing joint with a gel post see that flared post and the continuous top plate this is a square post and it doesn't really have a plate and more has the what's called the gert's and these are connecting that connect the building across titusville on top of the post and rafter exciter this is an american invention they do not have this new england but this is came right from the notice this barn has an offset door it's not in the center not exactly in the center that's a big tipoff that you've got of a barn before the civil war and chances are you might have an english tying joint so it's not you can tell a lot just from the outside of a building what it might be like next so here is a corner of the building here is that post not just out for the plate with the cross tie on top next here's another example this one is in winning ten and route twenty five and this is quite a pronounced this is quite a large post with that continuous plate cross tie on top necks and if you look long wood doll right through the hole that on this very me ok this is the inside of the barley barn from twelve ten back in england and you can see it's got the same post configuration but this long continuous plate notched out here with  and again here's the barn in norway and this barn is mid eight mid one thousand nine hundred so five hundred years this was the standard pretty remarkable you know to anything for ok this other type we call the dropped or connected girth framing with a square post is basically what you find if you don't have an english time joint next and the randalls place on cobs bridge road is and you can see we don't have a long continuous plate it's a segmented thing this is a square post its dimensions are pretty much the same throughout this is just a little easier ok you don't have to try to find a nice wide flaring but of a tree maybe you could get a post race from the saw mill square and it also helps to find that bent you just raise these sections and connect them don't have this continuous top plate i've seen some of these barns after a while they start walking and shift and next ok this is the same barn randall barn built with a drop digger configuration so there's a basic types again ok so after the english barn to get the new england barn put our own spin on it the english barn wasn't working all that well for us so we moved the entrance to the gable end we gave it a long cent and they were often built on slopes and this was from a newer basement because they realize that the manure was an important thing to keep and keep under cover because after a few seasons the fields were pretty stripped pretty fallow and they had been pitching manure outdoors but by the time spring came around it kind of degraded run away washed away so the manure became to be a valuable thing they wanted to stay so they started building these things on slopes and you know there was often a trapdoor along the gutter area where you would put the manure and save it so here's the two barns the english barn and the new england bar and then i'm sorry yet your back up the new england barn is much better suited to expansion than english barn ok next and here is buzz lamb and and this is their new england barn and this barn has been expanded it's perfect example of expansion and these are real barn people  now this is the inside of their barn this is this is one end of it you see they've got the english tying joint this post cut out with the plate in the tie on top next this is what they did at the front of the barn ok they drove this piece on with these dolls these trials and then they added a plate and they just got made a longer configuration but they didn't really hold true to the old style joinery we've got this kind of angle bracket here in some and a different rafter configuration much simpler necks and you can see the old this is the old part of the barn this is the new part of the barn the boardings going up and down and now it's going across because this these are rafters instead of  it's funny barns in our area of were built with carolyn's more often than they were with the rafter system but that was only in this part of new england you got real western new england vermont exciter and they build more with rafters which is interesting there's some more research to be done as to why these groups did the things they did that joint and you can see the carpenters marks here not only did they make the barn longer but they also made the roof steeper this is the bottom of the rafter that was sitting right here they shove this wedge they raised the barn to make a higher hay loft see the barn needed to be expanded the farm grew ok they needed to expand the barn before barns typically had a little bit of a shallower newer barns have a higher pitch because you want to big hayloft so instead of tear it down you get a new bar and they really put this thing through a modernization phase next and you can see here here's the rafter tendon which would have been that more or less you know the whole thing would have been much flatter of a slope it's interesting  k so moving along with farming beef and sheep ok beef and will where the big things in the early days dairy hadn't come on the scene yet it was eight hundred eight hundred twenty there were about thirty one thousand barns in maine eighteen twenty five the erie canal opens now why would that have anything to do with barn well that was another nail in the coffin for the maine farmer ok the area canal opened and it brought all kinds of produce from new york and that region brought it over sometimes cheaper than we could produce it ourselves so this was kind of main farming was already starting to decline here the first dairy cattle came along an hundred fifty four you know you may think terry's been with us forever but it hasn't and that was in farmingdale maine and eight hundred fifty interesting enough an apple orchard was considered the best income for farmers and eight hundred sixty there were fifty five thousand barns so we're still growing but right before the civil war and eight hundred eighty one main became part of the boston milk shed iced railcars a lot of dairy farmers to supply milk to boston bangor portland cetera and close to the end of the century dairy develops as a leading farm industry ok so we had the english barn this was before dairy came on the scene it was small there was no basement and kind of a lower pitched roof and it had no siding it was just boards because  nails ok you might have cited your house you would have bought nails the side your barn and this is what this would be the typical inside of an english barn very draft ok the animals suffered in the winter the farmer had to feed them a lot more hey then he probably would have a feed tightened up his building cetera and fifty years from then we really we've come a long way we start seeing barns like this the new england barn this once beautiful it's called a high drive bank barn you drive up so using gravity to your advantage you can drive a load of hay up here closer to the waft and the cattle are kept down here and so you can pitch the hay down it saves energy that's why i love this quote from the maine there humans association one thousand no seven speaks about how far barnes had come i am here this evening to say a word of welcome to you who represent the happy homes of maine you are also representatives of the great dairy interests of the states dairying today is simply in its infancy i remember when a boy and some of the older ones can easily remember the old barn with its great cracks the scrub cow the old milking stool but a wonderful change has come as the years have passed by today we find the blooded cow today we find a better barn a better house we find the barn shingle there collaborated and painted and the neatly kept lawn around the buildings everything has been progressing advancing with great strides since you and i were boys and i believe the future will see as great an advance in this industry for the blood of cows they were genetically breeding the cows for milk production before it was just the skin scrub cow and they got from it what they got from it next so the new features on the new england barnes in the mid one thousand nine hundred you started seeing the multilevel you started seeing them a newer basements yes they did this they did absolutely they helped event the building in both winter and summer next this is this is a barn sako ok originally the barn ended about here it was added  onto as most of england barns were and the silo started like this kind of on the inside of the building and they were square and you know the shortcomings of that are you can imagine a paper cup a paper coffee cup that square not very strong a round one much stronger so a lot of these blew out and they didn't have very good luck with the next this is the barn woodman rode the pier and you see we've got the cooper was you know you can have more than one and we've got this sloping ground here so the manure basement down below and this wonderful high drive feature i show this picture some people  ok this is a long ways from baled hay and probably oxen bringing in horses were considered too weak  building brief a lot of people try to keep pigeons and whatnot outfit she just put screen up or something that you should let the building breeze ok so the twentieth century dawns we get the gamb roof you will never see a binder the gambell room gambrell rules before the year one thousand nine hundred this is twentieth century phenomena they had their heyday between the first and second world war and they were for the hayloft you know we're now we're getting into more and more commercial farming  thousand farms in maine and probably as many barns so in about a hundred years this was dropped in half ok so maine farming was definitely on the decline in the early twentieth century next  it's amazing how much land was actively farmed in the beginning of this of the last century next so barns went through a lot in terms of regulations that put a lot of people out of the business they couldn't upgrade their bar nick cetera tuberculosis probably people know their grandparents serve somebody in their family who died of tb tb was huge we had t herd at the university of maine was found to be infected and had to be slaughtered next so use pasteurization you've got to have your milk pasteurized to sell it and that started being required in main town shortly after one thousand nine hundred and there we did distribution began consolidating into fewer and bigger players till by one nine hundred forty the farmer who owned a few cows and delivered his own product was rapidly becoming obsolete this pint of grey is a good example of a family that went through this just to milk sheds here this is the old one this is where the milk cans you know you milk into a pail you dump it in the big milk can you put it in the milk room for pickup and this might have been cooled with some ice or a spring or something like that well after the war world war two people most people had electricity  if you wanted to sell milk you had to have it put in a bulk tank you could no longer do the milk cans so this house was put on that and had a bulk tank inside so we slaughtered the cows at the university of maine and eight hundred ninety five the portland board of health required farmers shipping milk to the city to have their cattle tested and there were six inspectors in one nine hundred twenty testing main cattle we got a handle on it in the late thirty's eighty three thousand cattle were tested and only one in a thousand were positive so how did tb affect barn floor required instead of the wooden floor which was just a sponge for bacteria this put a lot of people out people couldn't afford to upgrade do this you've got interior lighting started to be mandated and that white washed of the lime mixture on the inside started  you could order a barn through sears and roebuck if you wanted back in the day most people probably know you could get a house through them well they also sold barnes ok next this is a good  right i don't know if you can make this out on these photos but this is talking about the hand cut joint and there's a gap here because where is this one is machine cut nice and tight so you don't want to have anything built by cattle on the bottom whereas before they probably would have been up here with the manure basement down here but we've got the cement floor and it's all open ok there's no post there's no beams a lot of people after they got tractors they didn't like their old barns because i can't drive my tractor and here this is being right here with these posts everywhere face they started cutting them out or altering them oftentimes for the worse this is the one hundred nineteen pride of the farmstead model you could get for eleven hundred dollars or the biggest one for forty five hundred and you see this is still loose hey ok ok so this is for the carpenters in the room they want to perk up here so from the thirteenth century to the nineteenth century ok barns were built with hand human timber off the waist because you want a chalk line you can see some chalk and you hugh to the line this is hard work it's unbelievably hard i try i took these pictures that a conference that happened down in new york a couple of years so this is what we call scribe rule where we're pairing everything together ok why do we pair things together so we take it for granted today that we can go and we can buy a perfectly uniform square piece of lumber  we can buy a lot of two by fours and they're all going to be pretty much the same well with hand human timber they're not the same you're lucky if they're square so you have to fit everything and this this board would have been this brace would have been put up here and scribed right to the line that's the scribe inscribed rule and then i've been marked that's how they would have been assembled next to this is the shakers bar and this brace you see here is the scribe rule and you know that because it has the carpenter's marriage marks and these braces off and get this kind of they call it a glue split and you'll see that this is flush here ok so interchangeable parts came along right the industrial revolution and revolutionized pretty much everything so the early eight hundred to one thousand nine hundred we had circular saw in frames no longer hand hewing stuff were soaring are timber and were built via the square rule and the english tieing joint is pretty much going away a good example of a barn built by the square rule is the goblins barn here on cobs bridge ro from the mid one nine hundred centuries next to this not it's not it's not flush the little housing there i'm just going to explain this will more this this is a hand human timber right it's pretty uneven it's pretty irregular but a carpenter came up with an epiphany one day and said you know what a perfectly smooth square and true beam a little bit got to that reference line they would snap they've typically snap a line right down the center and measure it with if they framed a seven by seven they'd measure three and a half from each side the line and make their not to that that way they can make all these posts the same and you can tell that here by this housing it's not flush the next you see here is the hand human being but they've made this little housing here's a barn in gray and you can see this not here here but there's hardly anyone here which means it's probably a little crown to this beam so they didn't need much there so nine hundred world war two english tying joints history and a joiner's or history the carpenter is now just an assembler he's no longer an artist of nails and hardware begin to replace pegs and timber and stud framing becomes increasingly dominant we have standardized lumber upon us ok this barn new gloucester on the one hundred is from about one hundred thirteen ok spine as well this is on two thirty one this is the chief humans place see we get some hardware appearing no pegs so to summarize a lot of what i've been talking about this evening these old barn quotes a really fascinating overlook the building on the farm which requires the most study and real good judgment to plan and to construct is the one least thought of in this respect and that is the barn stud framing and i was pretty new fangled technology at one time necessity is done much for the building public by introducing their favorable notice the balloon style of framing wooden buildings a style which is not well understood in the old settled  well tempered portions of the country new england included we held onto our traditional timber frame as long as we could tightening up it is a very great and beneficial improvement in building barns to have them shingle down the sides as well as the roof the extra expense is not so much as many people are ready to imagine as there is considerable savings to be made in the quality of boards and  the sides it keeps the barn warm and the frame dry therefore i think there is no loss and considerable gain in the end by shingling a side that's eight hundred forty one point to your question before the breath from cattle together with the vapor rising from the manure covers not only the floor over the cellar but the beams and the whole underside of the roof with pearly trickling drops for weeks together during the winter if the doors are thrown open in order to evaporate this more easter you'll lose the benefits you have been seeking in making a tight barn by reducing the temperature so much that cattle require more food while the effect is to reduce the flow of milk in the cows many large and valuable barns have been very much damaged by being placed over in the new or cellar without proper ventilation barns didn't always have sliding doors ok instead of old fashioned double loose swinging flapping doors which besides being inconvenient render the passage into the barn absolutely dangerous and when the weather each door great  small is now made single or in one piece and moved backwards and forwards so easily upon small iron wheels that a child could with facility open or shut them we know you have a big opening door here in maine you got to shove a lot snow to get get that open right sliding door is much better that was thought to be adopted from railroad car patent sliding door rural renewal ok there was never a time in our state when there was so much inquiry upon an interest in the proper arrangement and construction of barns as is now abroad among our farmers it is realized that there is money in a good barn and that one who proposes to put business methods into his management can afford to neglect his important tach meant to his farm hence up and down the state farmers are modifying and building over their ill planned structures or tearing them down to make room for the new and modern that's too bad tearing down the old barns in eight hundred ninety five innovation eight hundred ninety three there are four floors on to which a team with load can be driven thus saving much lifting of hay grain straw except the upper floor attic of the barn is reached by an easy grade made by building an embankment the driveway to the first floor is bridged to secure entrance to the upper floor twenty loads of hay can be run at once and stand on this floor if such an extreme thing should be necessary in threatening weather in unloading hay there was no pitching it up it was dumped over the sides and dropped onto the base of the first  and the coopers got pretty fancy in the victorian times among the many recent improvements in farming matters none is more conspicuous than the improvement in the construction of barns the gables doors and windows of the barn are frequently ornament that was the barn spiel yes there's many differences tapered flared typically a gunstock post is more of something found in the house and the gunstock post has is pretty squarely into you get to maybe the last couple of feet then it's an abrupt jowl abrupt flaring ok the typical barn has an aisle in the center with the cattle will be on the south side in the hay will be on the north side the smaller bad they will be the cattle side because cattle are only so long right and that's a convenient place to put a wall put your posts then you have your aisle and then you have a nice big bay for your loose hey which was piled as high as you could your  just one more thing on that in victorian times everything was they were all about balance all about design exciter they didn't like that offset door so they were right and center usually built right into the ground ok the only thing maybe above it is the roof in the door you know those are i think are a little different structure than a barn you don't keep livestock in there a lot of them out of a woodstove or they have chimneys them in order to keep the potatoes from freezing and when it's really cold in the dead of winter i don't have a lot of experience with how those are b l meaning they're newer ok they're not as the farms up there are not as old as here and they're almost exclusively detached from the house you don't have the connected farmstead up there so that's that's another thing about the age of the settlements in the farms up there most of the the connected farmstead was great for a while it was all the rage and we're probably familiar with thomas hobbes his book big house a house back house barn but that had shortcomings fire one end of the thing caught fire the whole thing burned after a while insurance they wouldn't cover you unless you had a separate barn just because the fire danger and two in victorian times and you again when the t coming on people didn't like the idea of being under the same roof as their animals maybe the smells would come in or the germs would come in so that's another reason why the barn became separated yes i don't know yeah they're pretty endangered maine is very fortunate in one respect that we are usually the last to get something right the interstate didn't come up here for quite a while first mcdonald's certainly wasn't built in maine we you know it takes allow for things to change appear so we still have a good amount of barns sadly most of them aren't used for farming anymore no blasters is really an exception to that the still i go to a barn to gloucester and everybody at least has some chickens it seems like  but for the most part a barn it's become kind of a catch all and storage vehicle for people and they say oh you don't want to take pictures in here do you know if i come to visit them but i don't know how many we have that's really and you can't really like before you could say ok this is farm census there's ok there's thirty thousand farms in the state at this date you can't really go by that anymore because a lot of people have barns and they're not a farmer so it would be a great thing i think vermont has undertaken a barn census a couple of years ago which is an amends undertaking i read one book published in the late ninety's where said vermont had thirty thousand b roughly and they said they were losing maybe a thousand a year to development fire snow cetera so they said by thirty years time or thirty thousand barns could very well be you know so it would be a very interesting project for me to do that but it would be an immense project to so i did i really don't know how many about that to speak to that and that's another you know area where there's still need some study to be done i wouldn't know i know typically the good barns the nice the nice barns the farmer didn't build them a joiner cain in fact when the colonists came over to the new world joiners were recruited to come to build the housing the churches the mills cetera on probably just for convenience there's regulations about dairying with with that kind of thing you have to have i think a dairy farm now in twenty ten you must have kind of thing but it all see too many of them in a barn that's kind of unusual the thanks folks it's been great to be back with my first story of about a barn we started here in new gloucester thank you