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Winter 2007 - Barn Yarn #3 - Town Barns Too

Winter 2007 Exerpt - Barn Yarn #3 - Town Barns Too

As the history, and fate, of our barns inches forward, we have "town cousins" in our family of barns. Country cousins are gaining some saving grace, but we have a whole league of barns inside our city limits to recognize, too. From the birth of all rural towns, most city houses had their matching barn. Even if fancy enough to be called a carriage house, they still took on the role with horses for transportation and their feed, of housing buggies, wagons, harnesses, the family dairy cow, and chickens for eggs and fryers. Many farms with big working barns had towns grow around them, and many of these barns became used for urban uses. We can't lose sight of these town treasures which served their equal due like their country icons. These town barns were the first to gain adaptive use. Johnson County had a big old hay barn which became the sock-hop mecca by the 1950's. Livery stables all became the first gas stations and mechanic and tire centers automatically, and nearly overnight, a hundred years ago. Carriage houses became garages, and often became living quarters as houses themselves. Farm barns that became town-bound quickly became popular as greenhouses to urban growth. And can't we all name an antique shop in most every town that took over a grand old barn? And if not an antique shop, an auction house claimed that ol' red barn. One barn by Larned, Kansas became a hospital, and then even became a church. In Fredonia, Kansas a stone town barn used the second floor as a school for many years.

But before the 20th century got far, we began losing most of the traditional town barns. They fell long before the fate of their country cousins. Refrigeration allowed dairies to deliver milk (by horse at first) to city folks. Horses lost to gas horse-power and thus the need to maintain a barn out back of the city house. Chickens were the last barnyard critter to be banned from towns, so many of us can still remember the rooster's morning wake-up in towns. Without these needs, town barns quickly lost their lives to city growth. Most were torn down, but some barns were moved from town to the country before trapped. Moved by mules, before any historical groups existed, they retreated to the country life. But we now have few town barns remaining to show their role in town history.

Of town barns saved, an example is the Hoisington Historical Society taking on and restoring their small town barn that had housed the dairy cows to the house given to be the historical society. Hoisington used a pasture on the north side of the town site for everyone's dairy cow. The cows would be taken out to pasture, and in the evening when gathered, the cows knew their own way home to their own barn for milking. Such communities called these "town herds". To think there are as many stories, or more stories, of the town barns across our land, as country barns. Least we forget the town barn in which a cow kicked over the lantern and started the Chicago fire.

As we grow in scope as a Barn Alliance seeking the barns to survey, to document, to photograph, to help save, we are realizing ever greater, the value in these architectural cornerstones of our landscape and townscape. To let our barns fall to the bulldozer, or be burned down to save taxes, is indeed destroying a barn "church" that gave spirit, a barn "hospital" that healed our beasts of burden, a barn "school" to growing family. The future is not going to afford or deem as ecologically sane, letting the homely barn continue on the road to extinction. We know clearly that the survival of one barn is of greater community value than the survival of one house. In town or country, the barn has a role yet.

However, the luck of town barns, though already scarcer, is that they can be adaptively used easier than their country cousin. A city barn certainly has the opportunity of more folks at hand to support it's suvival, too. It can show off a restoration and be a ready flagship, as the traffic of the public eye surrounds such barns. Just last year a lady, after coming on a barn tour, suddenly realized she owned a barn! Abmiring barns for years, it hit that her big old two-story "garage" with sliding doors to alley and sliding doors to the backyard, was a barn. Sometimes our town barns are so close, we have overlooked them. Well, the Kansas Barn Alliance is also coming to town, so open those fine old sliding doors. Hey, leaving a barn door open can really be good!