Last year I was faced with making a decision about our old hay barn on the farm. It had developed some serious roof problems, and badly deteriorated siding on the north and south ends, as well as various and sundry lesser problems. The question was whether to try to stabilize it and make it last for the future, or to take it down.
Probably if I were thinking only of practicality, I would have not had a second thought about taking it down. It is not the kind of barn that farmers build these days. It was built in the early 1940s, in an era when horses were the normal source of farming horsepower, and mechanical hay balers were few and far between. We had an old horse-drawn mower, an old horse-drawn dump rake, an old wooden-wheeled horse-drawn hay wagon, a 10-year-old Chevy car, andno farm pickup at all. But in 1943, even with World War II going on in earnest, the Great Depression was lifting, our big barn was new, and there was a little money to be made in farming.
Dad had borrowed about $5,000 from the Federal Land Bank to get started farming. A new barn was one of the first orders of business. I’m not sure which came first - Mom’s gas-powered washing machine, or the new barn with the snazzy hay fork on a trolley track high overhead.
In those days, you could order most anything from the Montgomery Ward catalog. The washing machine and the hay fork outfit for the barn came from the Montgomery Ward catalog.Mother used to talk about ordering things out of the catalog. I guess I was a little bit dense as a tiny boy, because I remember puzzling about how to get things out of the catalog. I remember seeing all kinds of things in there, but I didn’t quite get it as to how you got them out of there. Then one day, after Mom had ordered a dress out of the catalog, I discovered that the mailman had got the dress out of the catalog and put it in our mailbox up by the road. Then I happened to be going through the catalog looking at a new red wagon that I needed, and I discovered that Mom’s dress was still in there, in the catalog, but here she was, wearing it. It took me awhile to make sense of that ordering out of the catalog business.
Another reason not to fix up an old barn is that it costs to fix up old barns.
Back in the early ’40s, 50 cents an hour was goodwages. By 1960, wages were a $1 an hour, and that wasn’t very good. Now, even $12 an hour is low. Actually, way back then, barn-building labor was free, as long as you did it yourself, which is what Dad and Grandpa did, along with a bit of occasional help from neighbor men like Floyd Walker and Enoch Patterson. The neighbors used to trade work with each other; now everything costs money.
I had always been proud of our barn, though, because it was designed with the help of Mr. J.P.G.
Rouhlac. Mr. Rouhlac was a very highly respected school teacher, mathematician, architect, carpenter and school principal. I didn’t realize it at the time, but with our old barn, Mr.
Rouhlac began helping me learn about geometry and trigonometry. One of the first things my dad showed me about building a barn was the importance of thebracing. The strength of the barn is not in the massiveness of its posts and walls, but how well they are braced; and to brace things you make three-sided structures, triangles. Our barn has the usual massive hip roof. The object of the roof, aside from covering the corn crib, milking area and stalls, was to cover over the huge haystack in the middle, and to protect it. In a good hay year, the hay in the barn could be stacked all the way from the ground the peak of the roof, 30 feet deep or so. The huge roof, with no bars or cables across the expanse, put enormous outward pressure on the lower structure, and without good bracing would have spread the walls apart. I thought at first that the side sheds were just extraneous add-ons, to give us stalls.
But in looking over the structure, I discovered that the trigonometry of theside sheds was really what kept the big main pillars braced upright and straight.
The old barn shows me that years pass, times change, ways of doing things evolve, and sometimes what used to be just goes away. Living calls for flexibility, sometimes requiring a new plan and a new application. I learned several things in the old barn, like the need to get things done even when you are not in the mood, learning to enjoy work and accomplishment, and learning how to pick up a feed sack without breaking your back.
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 02/20/2013