Barns Are Quickly Becoming One of Vermont’s Newest Export Items

Long ago, workers crafted the barn out of chestnut timbers on a hill with a view of Vermont’s Lake Champlain.

Tall, vast, with a steep roof, it served as a dairy and a hay barn; later, it housed calves and provided storage.

This year, it’s getting its first view of the Pacific.

Peter and Betsy Currie, who live in Palo Alto, bought the barn this fall and had it shipped 3,000 miles to Lopez Island off the coast of Washington. They plan to reassemble it as a second home that is redolent of the childhood summers that Betsy Currie, 40, spent on a Vermont farm.

“It’s wonderful to have an opportunity to buy something so old and breathe new life into it, and know that it’s going to have such a special spot in our hearts,” she said, “as opposed to the quick and extravagant purchases that are so much the norm in Silicon Valley.”

The Curries got the idea for moving the barn from Betsy Currie’s father, who owns a farm in Chelsea, Vt. They got logistical help from Rob Brewer of Brandon, Vt., who buys and sells old outbuildings all over the country.

The Curries, it seems, are part of a trend: Several Vermont brokers specialize in taking apart old buildings and putting them up somewhere else.

“I don’t know if that should be a horrifying thought or not,” Currie said. “At least the barns are being saved, and not torn down as they are on the West Coast.”

They’re being torn down in Vermont too, Brewer said. Or they’re collapsing. He sees his work as saving barns from ruin.

“You only have to drive around these backwoods to see barns falling over,” Brewer said. “Beautiful farmland at one point, and all the barns are heaps out in the field somewhere. So I can justify it that way.”

The Curries’ barn, which Brewer estimates was built around 200 years ago, was missing some boards and starting to lean, he said.

“How long could it last in its current state? Not until the end of the century,” Brewer said.

No one disputes that it’s common to see barns in terminal states of disrepair in Vermont. But historians wish there were some way to save them without moving them far away.

“We’re losing very valuable parts of our rural Vermont landscape with the loss of these barns,” said Glenn Andres, a Middlebury College art history professor. “It’s very sad. Once you take a building out of its historic context, it really loses a lot of its meaning.”

Brewer bought the Waltham barn, which is 56 feet long and 30 feet wide, from dairy farmer Jim Mahan for $2,000. The barn stood out because of its hand-hewn chestnut timbers.

“It had some beautiful beams,” recalled New Haven dairy farmer Don Hallock, 66, who once owned the property the barn stood on. “As perfect a hewed beam as I’d ever seen.”

That’s part of the appeal for the Curries.

“It is the most beautiful work of art you’ve ever seen,” said Betsy Currie, whose husband is a vice president at Netscape. “The timbers are a beautiful honeyed color.”

The Curries also liked its Vermont roots.

“The Vermont barn draws on my childhood,” Betsy Currie said. “In the Northwest, I’m sure there are some beautiful 50-year-old barns for sale, but it’s a different feeling for me.”

Old Vermont buildings are especially appealing to people who live in places where all the buildings are new, said barn-mover Ken Epworth of Woodstock.

“We take a hand-hewn beam much more for granted living in this area than you would if you were living in Colorado or California,” Epworth said. “The fact that it’s all fastened together with wooden pegs and there aren’t nails has something to do with it too.”

Barns aren’t the only things that get shipped out of state. Churches, mansions, carriage houses--all have caught the eye of out-of-staters with money and ideas, said Curtis Johnson at the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation.

Even stone walls have headed South and West.

“People evidently like them for the moss and lichens that have grown on them,” Johnson said. “They put them into a bucket loader and haul them down to Connecticut.”

The state funds a $75,000 matching grant program for barn preservation. But Epworth said that isn’t enough.

“The reality is they’re awarding a pittance to 10 people a year to fix their barn,” Epworth said. “They could change the legislation around for instance so people weren’t being taxed on their barns, and it could certainly help keep a lot more barns standing.”

Anyway, the situation has worked out well for people like the Curries, who plan to start building their home on Lopez Island next year.

‘People don’t think you’re crazy in Vermont for buying a beautiful old barn,” Betsy Currie said. “I think it’s very exciting that we’re going to be able to do this.”