Rustic Wood Barns Shed Un-Hip Image

Drive any back road and you’ll see them, sagging sentries of an era past: barns with curves and barns with gables, barns painted white or red or gray. Some with proud peaks jutting off roof lines, others modest, a rectangle, a box. All crumbling. Most abandoned.

Once the hub of rural life--a place for Saturday night dances and Monday morning chores, a splintery hide-out for the children, a sturdy shelter for the cows--the handcrafted wooden barns that marked the Midwest landscape for a century have faded into obsolescence.

Time and wind, rain and neglect have shredded their shingles and buckled their walls. The barns collapse. They are torn down. They give way to newer, more efficient storage sheds of fiberglass and steel. Hundreds fall into ruin each year in Iowa alone. It’s the same in Nebraska and Indiana and Michigan, state after state losing barn after barn.

Increasingly, they are missed.

In a burst of nostalgia and folk-art fervor, preservationists have committed time and money to saving the barns that tell so much about a vanished way of life.

Iowa has led the way with a nonprofit foundation that has raised nearly $375,000 for restoration. The foundation has handed out more than two dozen grants to owners willing to preserve antique barns in perpetuity. The public can see the results this weekend in the first-ever state barn tour--a meandering, self-guided drive through Iowa that will show off 18 restored structures and perhaps drum up more support for preservation.

“Barns are about people, and every barn has so many stories within its walls,” said Jacqueline Schmeal, who helped create the Iowa Barn Foundation. “We have just got to keep them.”

Many, apparently, share her passion. At least half a dozen states sponsor barn restoration workshops; New Hampshire and New York even hand out grants. There’s talk in Congress of offering incentives to barn owners who rehab rather than raze. And the traveling Smithsonian Institution exhibit “Barn Again! Celebrating an American Icon” has been drawing record crowds to rural museums across the country. The barns themselves are becoming hip, a status symbol among folks who may never have milked a cow or shoveled manure.

“They’re so big now, you see one in a magazine every month,” said Ken Epworth, a Vermont restoration expert. “The traditional architecture really has magnetism.”

Epworth has built a sturdy business--The Barn People--of dismantling, refurbishing and then relocating old barns, often moving them clear across the country to serve as a guest house or an artist’s studio. Restored barns have also been converted into restaurants, antique stores, even swank inns. (One bed and breakfast in Ohio offers suites with satellite TV and whirlpool tubs in the rustic frame of a turn-of-the-century barn.)

Out here in Iowa, however, farmers have little use for such showy projects. They need their barns to be barns--handy sheds for storing equipment, feed and animals. And the old wooden structures, however winsome, are not up to modern demands.

The support posts that hold up the ceilings of old barns are so close together that there’s no room to park a harvester or a combine. The lofts cannot hold huge round bales of hay. And the rumpled, low-key atmosphere of old barns--kids swinging from the rafters, chickens pecking in the corn crib--is not suited to the assembly-line precision of modern livestock science. Animals today are raised in huge “confinement facilities,” not in barns.

Experts with the National Trust for Historic Preservation insist it is possible, even economical, to retrofit old barns as equipment sheds. They help 1,200 farmers a year do just that. “It’s more and more on peoples’ radar screens,” project director David Olson said. Even he admits, however, that “it can be a hard sell.”

As David Murphy of the Nebraska State Historical Society put it: “There’s just not a contemporary use for the space these old barns provide.”

To barn fans, that’s all the more reason to save them.

“Every day that goes by, these barns are more valuable, because they tell about a part of our history that would otherwise be forgotten,” said Craig Pfantz, a farmer in central Iowa.

Pfantz remembers the barn his great-grandfather built as a place of laughter, of rope swings and hay-bale mazes and endless games of shoot-’em-up in the slanting sunlight that edged through chinks in the wood. There were sweaty times too in the barn--tough times, hours spent mucking out pig stalls or wrestling scratchy bales of hay into stacks.

He wants to preserve those memories by saving the barn, a huge rectangular structure built in 1902 and gussied up with Victorian details such as carved wooden doors, a four-gable roof and a gingerbread cupola. With the help of a $12,000 grant from the Iowa Barn Foundation, Pfantz is slowly restoring the barn, wood shingle by wood shingle.

Another grant recipient, California developer Paul Ramsey, has an even more ambitious plan. Though he now lives in Newport Beach, Ramsey is restoring his family homestead south of Des Moines, including a 72-year-old barn he played in every summer of his childhood. He plans to set up a nonprofit foundation that will run the farm as a tourist attraction, offering families a chance to milk cows, collect eggs and experience life as Midwesterners lived it in the 1920s and ‘30s.

“I guess I’m a little sentimental,” Ramsey said.

Foundation organizers hope this type of barn nostalgia revs up interest in the statewide tour this weekend. Visitors can stop by just a few barns or try to hit them all, exploring such quirky features as a dumbwaiter to move manure, cow stanchions with built-in drinking cups and timber posts chopped in such a hurry that the builder did not bother to peel off all the bark.

Here in Washington, a town of 7,000 in eastern Iowa, Jerry Strabala will be showing off his restored barn with pride.

Strabala bought his farm three years ago after retiring from a career as a fertilizer salesman. Soon after, he and his sons set to work cleaning up the barn, a mess of peeling shingles, buckling floorboards and stripping paint. “I just didn’t want to tear it down,” he said.

Strabala received a grant from the Iowa Barn Foundation and spent $20,000 of his own funds to fix up the barn, which was built by a U.S. senator in the 1920s. He doesn’t know what he will do with it when it’s done. But he does know he likes the way it looks on his land. And he’s proud to have saved it, if a bit taken aback by all the accolades from preservationists.

One foundation member, he said, kept urging him on by telling him that restoring the barn was the best thing he could do for Iowa. “I thought, ‘Holy cow, I didn’t know it was that special,’ ” Strabala said with a chuckle.

“I just did it because it’s a neat old barn.”