Raising the Roof in Vermont : Old Barns Vanishing Into Chic Housing

The barns of Vermont are part of history, say critics of companies that are dismantling the familiar structures, moving them and reassembling the frames for expensive new houses.

The barn movers say the buildings are dilapidated and finding other uses for them is better than allowing them to crumble.

“Even if it goes out of state, people will see what an old barn was,” said Ken Epworth, a founder of Barn People of Woodstock, which has been dismantling barns for more than a decade. “You can’t see it if it’s disappeared.”

Preservationists such as Eric Gilbertson say each barn loss n makes it more difficult to identify Vermont’s agricultural heritage.

“Every state developed differently, and you can read a state by looking at its old buildings,” said Gilbertson, director of the state’s division for historic preservation. “How do you recognize a place that was a farm if the barns are gone?”

Thomas Vissor, a professor with the University of Vermont’s historic preservation program, said pre-Civil War barns, known as Yankee barns, are the most hunted because they are likely to have post-and-beam construction with hand-hewn beams and many are 30 feet by 40 feet--a good size for a house.

Distinctive Architecture

Yankee barns are characterized by a shallow, pitched roof, vertical planking on the outside, a large, hinged door on the long side and three bays inside.

“If they were houses, we would certainly recognize them as being historic,” Vissor said.

Epworth agreed that Vermont is losing its barns but said the salvagers are not to blame. “More than any other factor, it’s deterioration,” he said. “Farmers aren’t using them.”

Epworth and his partner, David Hill, began by taking down old houses for scrap, then expanded to barns. In the mid-1970s, as post-and-beam architecture became popular again, they began using the barn frames for new buildings.

Most of their barns come from near White River Junction in Vermont and New Hampshire. About a quarter of the barns remain in Vermont; the rest go out of state.

People who buy the barns are looking for a piece of history and an architectural relic that can’t be found among the staples and plywood of modern building, said Ken Arthur, a partner in Vermont Historic Frames and Barns, which has dismantled six barns in the last year.

‘Like Being in Church’

“There’s a gut love for the old buildings because they are not made any more,” said Arthur. “It’s like being in church for some people. It’s a feeling you just can’t put you finger on it.”

It may be the wide beams from a single tree, rippled slightly by the ax blade, raised without a crane and hitched to the rafters by tree nails (wooden pegs).

“Once you see one, you fall in love,” Arthur said.

In recent years, Epworth said, the market for slate roofing has fueled the hunt for barns because someone taking only the slate and burning or bulldozing the rest can work much faster than someone who plans to use the frame, each piece of which must be marked for reassembly.

“The buildings we’re taking down are all dilapidated,” he said. “We won’t take down a perfectly good structure.”

Nationwide, barns have been threatened by changing farm practices. The National Trust for Historic Preservation last year sponsored a competition in remodeling old barns for modern uses.

Mary Humstone, director of the Denver-based Barn Again program, said the 500 entries showed many economically sound ways farmers can continue using their barns.