What a barn had to do
A barn is a working building, and almost every feature of an old one answers a practical question. Where will the grain be threshed? Where will the hay go so that it stays dry and does not catch fire? Where do the animals shelter in winter, and how does feed get down to them? How does a loaded wagon get in, and out again? The National Park Service's preservation brief on historic barns makes the same point from the other direction: farmers built barns to help them work the land, and a barn is best understood together with the fields, fences, silos and outbuildings around it.
Because the questions changed, the barns changed. The farms of the first European settlers grew grain and kept a few animals. Later farms sold into growing markets, specialised in dairy, tobacco or hay, and finally mechanised. Each stage left barns behind, and many farms still have buildings from several stages standing side by side. This guide follows that sequence in broad strokes; the other guides look at the main types in more detail.
Barns the settlers brought
The earliest substantial barns in the colonies followed the building traditions of the people who built them. Three traditions matter most for the barns that survive.
- Dutch barns. The National Park Service describes the barns of Dutch settlers in the Hudson, Mohawk and Schoharie valleys of New York, and parts of New Jersey, as the first great barns built in the country. They have a broad gable roof, wagon doors in the narrow end, and a heavy interior frame of H-shaped units around a central threshing floor. Few survive, and most of those date from the late eighteenth century.
- English barns. The three-bay English barn, also called a Yankee or Connecticut barn, has one storey, no bank, and three spaces: one for animals, a central threshing floor, and a hay mow or granary. The Pennsylvania State Historic Preservation Office says the form was first built in New England, and that in southeastern Pennsylvania it was built most often between 1790 and 1840.
- German and Swiss bank barns. The Pennsylvania barn, built into a slope with an overhanging upper storey called a forebay, reflects the traditions of German-speaking settlers. The Minnesota State Historic Preservation Office places its first appearance in the United States in Pennsylvania in the early eighteenth century, and traces its origins to hillside house-barns in Switzerland and southern Germany.
Other settlers brought other forms. In North Carolina, the State Library's encyclopedia notes German settlers' hillside barns, a single-level ground barn, and the Appalachian crib barn of rough logs notched at the corners. The National Park Service brief adds Finnish log barns in Idaho and Czech and German-Russian house barns in South Dakota. Where good timber was scarce, builders used what they had: the same brief lists lava rock in south-central Idaho and adobe in California and the Southwest.
Market farming and new forms
As farming became more commercial in the nineteenth century, barns grew and adapted. The Pennsylvania field guide describes the gable-front barn, with its doors in the narrow end, gaining favour because, unlike the English barn, it could be lengthened simply by adding to the gable end. Large "double decker" barns in southeastern Pennsylvania, built in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, reflect high production and better roads to the Philadelphia market. Three gable barns, an L or T made by adding a large wing to a forebay barn, were commonly built between 1875 and 1925, partly to store the straw produced in quantity by steam threshing.
Ventilation became a design concern. Louvered ventilators became popular in the late nineteenth century, helped by cheaper milled lumber, and kept hay and grain from overheating. Brick barns in south-central Pennsylvania were built with patterns of open brickwork in their gable ends for the same reason. The same field guide records date stones on barns of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and painted star and flower medallions whose use, it says, dates back to the 1780s.
Some new forms were promoted rather than inherited. Round and many-sided barns were not built in numbers until the 1880s, when agricultural colleges and experiment stations taught farming based on ideas of industrial efficiency, and they kept appearing until well into the 1920s. In the West, the prairie or Western barn, with its long sweeping roof and a projecting peak over the hay door, held feed for larger herds. One Montana barn shown in the National Park Service brief was built in 1887-1889 after disastrous livestock losses, and could hold 500 cattle.
Dairy, science and mail order
Dairying reshaped barns more than any other change. The Pennsylvania field guide dates the gable entry bank barn, with cows in two rows on the ground floor and hay above, to about 1875 to 1925, and links it to the rise of dairying and a market economy. Twentieth-century stable barns, also called Wisconsin style dairy barns, have a rounded gambrel roof over a large hay loft and plenty of windows below, and were often built of concrete block and sheathing rather than heavy timber and stone.
Two forces spread these designs. Agricultural science and state regulation pressed for light, ventilation, easily cleaned surfaces and no manure basement under the cows. And the national farm press, extension publications and commercial catalogues sold plans and kits. The Pennsylvania field guide notes that Gothic arch barns were on the cover of a 1918 Sears, Roebuck book of barns, and that barn kits were sold by mail order from around 1905 until the 1940s, their pre-cut materials shipped by railroad for local assembly. In framing, the Shawver truss, introduced in 1904, and the plank frames that became popular in Minnesota in the 1910s made room for bigger hay mows with lighter, nailed timber. The dairy barns guide follows this story in detail.
Barns for one crop
Some barns were built for a single crop and look like nothing else. Tobacco barns were designed around curing: tall, ventilated air-curing barns in Maryland, Kentucky and Pennsylvania, and small, tight flue-cured barns in North Carolina, where by 1925 Coastal Plain builders were turning to concrete. The National Park Service brief also lists hop-drying barns in the Northwest and rice barns in South Carolina, and adds that some barns fit no category at all and simply reflect an owner's taste, wealth or unorthodox ideas about farming. The tobacco barns guide covers curing barns.
Pole barns and empty barns
After the Second World War, the Pennsylvania field guide records a turn to economy and open space. Pole barns, with light posts carrying a shallow gable roof and walls of wood or metal sheathing, could be put up cheaply with unskilled labour and serve almost any purpose. Free stall barns, recommended by agricultural experts as healthier for cattle, let cows move freely in a large open shed, with a separate milking parlor. Low concrete block milking parlors were attached to many older barns as milking was mechanised.
Those changes left many older barns without a job. The crops some were built for faded, and their spaces did not suit new machinery and methods. The North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office says modern bulk curing has made every traditional flue-cure tobacco barn in that state obsolete. In Southern Maryland, the Maryland Historical Trust records a state tobacco buyout program, begun in 2001, that most of the region's growers joined, leaving many tobacco barns standing empty. The guide to caring for an old barn looks at what preservation guidance recommends for buildings like these.
Often said, and what is recorded
Old barns were all built the same way, and the differences are just decoration.
State surveys classify barns by plan, roof, bank, framing and use, and tie each form to a group of settlers, a period or a crop. Most of the differences are functional.
Kit barns from catalogues were a passing novelty.
The Pennsylvania field guide treats mail-order barns as a recognised part of the record: kits were sold for decades, and the Gothic arch design was the most popular one Sears sold, because its framing left the loft free of crosspieces.