Читать книгу Barns of Connecticut - Markham Starr - Страница 7

Introduction

If you have ever walked into an old barn, you can probably still recall the emotions you experienced. If you have never been in such a building, I suggest you avail yourself of the first opportunity. The colors, textures, and aromas inside a barn bring back the past as few buildings can. For me, walking into a barn is as close as I can get to walking into history. Old churches, town halls, and antique homes, perhaps a bit drafty by modern standards, may retain the barest memory of the years they’ve absorbed. Electrical and plumbing systems, however, as well as a hundred other modern transformations, often mask the essence of what it meant to inhabit such a dwelling a century ago. Barns, on the other hand, seldom undergo such transformations. The dust of decades still rests atop timbers long exposed to the passage of time. Webs cast by spiders long since departed festoon the corners, and dried animal dung adds pungency to the air. There is a palpable feeling of the life that once infused the barn.

Early Connecticut barns consist of little more than four walls, a gable roof, and perhaps two doorways. A few windows, if any, illuminate the completely open floor plan within the deceptively simple structure. Nevertheless, for the first European settlers in Connecticut, as with nearly all emerging agricultural societies, the barn’s important role can hardly be overstated. In fact, as a measure of their importance, barns were once considered military targets in times of war. The British destroyed them during the American Revolution, as did General Sherman a hundred years later in his devastating March to the Sea. A population could be brought to its knees through the destruction of its barns.

While we often think of the church as the most important building in colonial life, it was in fact the barn that held survival’s key. Not until basic necessities were well secured could townspeople begin to consider building a house of worship. Barns often came even before houses in order of importance. In early English history one building often served all purposes, and people, animals, and harvests all shared the same space. Without the barn, agricultural life in colder northern climates could not have flourished. Once societies moved beyond the primitive hunting and gathering model that had sustained them for millennia, storehouses became essential to their year-round survival. Settlers arriving in Connecticut in the mid-1600s came from an agrarian heritage, and the barns they built spoke of the culture in which they were embedded. Early Connecticut barns reflect a European heritage in their importance, design, and construction. The model for these buildings was so successful that it would be nearly two hundred years before Connecticut barn builders would consider change.

With this notion of the barn’s importance to Connecticut’s earliest European settlers — and my own fondness for them — I set out to write this book. Greatly aided by the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation’s Barn Survey, I tried to identify some of the most important barns in the state. This book is not an exhaustive study, but rather a showcase of this marvelous structure in many of the forms that grace our land.

This book is also, I hope, a tribute to the continuing, and continually reflowering, family-farm culture of the state.

The First Barns in Connecticut

When early settlers populated the state, nearly every homestead required a barn of one size or another. Barns held the essentials of life. Horses and oxen used for transportation or work were stabled in the barn. Cows, pigs, chickens, and sheep also required a barn, to moderate winter temperatures and keep predators at bay. Grains and grasses grown to feed farm families and their livestock were stored within these buildings, alongside the animals themselves. And, of course, farmers stored essential field equipment there. While early barns seem humble in appearance, the role they fulfilled was anything but. Our ancestors survived on the three basic essentials: food, clothing, and shelter, and the barn played the leading role in that equation.

The first European settlers in Connecticut were Dutch, following Adriaen Block’s explorations of the coastline in 1614, but English settlers transplanted from Massachusetts soon followed the Dutch into the Connecticut River valley. By the mid-1600s, the English had become the predominant European population.

The very first structures built in New England were, by necessity, quite crude. Rough log structures and earthen homes protected settlers as they cleared land and began to establish themselves and their farms. As soon as circumstances permitted, these early settlers constructed traditionally framed structures like those they had left behind. The earliest surviving home in Connecticut, the Henry Whitfield house, was built of stone in 1639. The oldest timber-framed home in the state is the Joseph Loomis homestead, built one year later, and a dozen or more framed houses constructed before 1700 still stand. These early structures mimic the framing traditions from which they sprang. No Connecticut barns from the 1600s are known to have survived, but we can see some of their foundations and sense their structures from seventeenth-century paintings, drawings, and literature.

Since the earliest house frames in both Connecticut and Massachusetts closely follow English framing traditions, it may be safe to assume that both the design and construction details of the first barns in Connecticut did as well. The building method settlers used, known as post-and-beam construction, employed heavy hewn timbers to form the barn’s skeleton, upon which barn builders applied a sheathing of sawn boards. The roofs, which may initially have been thatched, would be covered with split wooden shingles. This design was so successful for the single-family subsistence farmer that such barns were still occasionally being built even into the twentieth century. Post and beam barns are still built on occasion in Connecticut as new farms spring to life.

The English Barn

The location of the barn on nearly every farm in Connecticut was, of course, well within sight of the farmhouse — yet far enough away to ensure that a fire in one building would not bring down the other. Farmers wanted to be able to see and hear what was going on at the barn throughout the day and night, since being able to sense trouble brewing was critical to staving off problems before they grew too large. When possible, barns were also situated to catch the greatest amount of the sun’s light and warmth during its track across the sky. Hard-working farmers appreciated any available comforts.

The floor plan for the barn was fixed by tradition. These early barns were so similar in size and layout that they are known today as 30x40s. That is, they generally measure out to be something near thirty feet wide and forty feet long. The timber frames for these buildings divide the structure into three distinct bays, or sections. While there is some variation from barn to barn, it is astonishing to modern eyes to see just how little. Before settlers even considered crossing the Atlantic, hundreds of years of structural evolution had refined the barn to the point where a family could depend on its being the correct size and shape necessary for their survival. Much like evolution in animal and plant life, the English barn progressed to become an intelligent answer to a particular problem.

Early English barn.

The English barn was a gable-ended structure with the major doorway on the long side of the building beneath the eaves. These barns often had a pair of large doors on both sides of the building, which allowed wagons to pass directly through. While the large doorways provided much-needed light and air during warm summers, in winter months smaller entryways made more sense. Small doors were often built into larger doors. Given the precious nature of glass at this time, barns were built without windows. When the doors were closed, the only light penetrating the gloom would have come from gaps between the planking of the exterior siding. In the winter, barn interiors were quite cold, being able to elevate outdoor temperatures only slightly, but this was enough to keep farm animals alive.

The three bays of the barn were often quite open, from the ground level on up to the roof’s ridgeline. The center bay of the barn was generally left clear to allow for the passage of wagons. A tightly laid wooden floor was common in this area of the barn, as grains such as wheat and oats were threshed here before the advent of mechanical threshers. To separate the seeds from the rest of the plant, workers placed grasses on this floor and beat them with flails. Wind blowing through the open doors of the barn would waft away the chaff — the unusable portion of the plant — as the seeds were tossed into the air. Once separated from the chaff, the seeds were collected and stored.

The center bay also provided a working space sheltered from the weather for whatever purpose may have been needed: the repair or building of equipment, animal husbandry, or the thousand other tasks related to daily life. The bays to either side of this central bay were used to store grasses and other crops or to house farm animals. Except for the animal stalls, these bays were kept open to the rafters, rather than being divided into rooms. These two bays, at least early on, generally had simple dirt floors. While economics may have played a role in that decision, it was also more practical to have earthen floors where animals were penned. Wooden floors covering the entire first floor of the barn became necessary, of course, with the advent of cellars.

Floor plan.

In early New England, farmers might keep sheep, cows, pigs, chickens, oxen, or horses. These were animals that could withstand the winter temperatures if kept out of biting winds and falling rain or snow. Their wooden stalls were built to accommodate them over the harshest months. The pens kept the animals separated from the grasses and grains stored around them, and encouraged huddling for added warmth.

Differences between Early Barn and Early House Construction

The skills and framing techniques a carpenter used to build barns and homes were much the same; there were few significant differences between the two. Of course the daily operations taking place within the barn were quite different from those taking place within the home, leading to differences in interior layout. The barn, in contrast to the home, was an open and airy structure. Since timber-framed structures are self-supporting — that is to say, they do not depend on sheathed walls for stability, as modern buildings do — a timber-framed structure can be left entirely open without fear of collapse. For grass-crop storage, voluminous space was required, and farmers knew well the importance of air circulation. Grass crops are subject to mildew and rot if not thoroughly dried, and imperfectly dried grasses can spontaneously combust — something settlers could ill afford. Additionally, dried grasses were not pressed into neat rectangular bales as they are today. Rather, they were stored loosely as they were cut and placed in the barn by pitchfork. Open spaces allowed for easier pitching.

The Connecticut farmhouse had a different role to play. Beyond being a place to eat and sleep, the home was also a workshop where essential tasks were performed. Foods were cooked and preserved, wool was spun and made into clothing, and products were made to trade for necessities not available on the farm. While, like the barn, the home’s primary function was to keep its inhabitants warm and safe, it needed to do a better job of it. Open and lofted spaces are treasured in today’s homes, but such large volumes of air were impossible to warm with the primitive heating systems available at the time. Unlike the barn’s occupants, the inhabitants of the home couldn’t weather the temperatures of the winter months without being a little more snug. Planking on the sides of their homes was itself sheathed with either split wooden shingles or riven clapboards. Interior walls were plastered as a further measure against drafts. Rooms within early houses tended to be smaller than the rooms we live in today. Low ceilings helped to keep rooms warm by reducing the volume of air. While New England’s homes were certainly quite cold by modern standards, fireplaces and eventually more efficient woodstoves kept the family moderately comfortable by burning first wood and, later on, coal.

Unlike domestic structures, barns had no requirements for uniform floor levels between sections. They could be at one height or any other — practicality determined the particulars for each working level. In early barn layout and construction, form strictly followed function in an attempt to make the work within the barn’s walls as efficient as possible. The needs of the farm and the farmer took precedence over other considerations. Because everything today is strictly ordered and governed by building codes, floor levels in old barns often seem randomly placed to our modern eyes. We do not expect to bang our heads on timbers or fall through openings as we walk through a building. In a working barn, however, modern safety regulations would have been a hindrance and dramatically reduced efficiency. A particular farmer might have specified a height to the mow, or hayloft, because he knew how high he swung his pitchfork from the ground or from atop his wagon.

The requirements were different for the ends of the barn, in which the animals were housed. The second floor height might start slightly above the maximum height of the animal intended to live there. The flooring above an oxen stall, for example, would be higher than the flooring above the sheep. Keeping floor heights at a minimum above stalls not only made better use of the available space but also added the benefit of keeping the animals warmer in winter. To decide arbitrarily that the second floor should always start, say, at eight feet would waste valuable barn space. When one’s survival is at stake, decisions are generally made for very practical reasons.

Floor heights often vary in older barns.

In addition to varying floor heights, irregular construction is also seen in barn lofts, which did not need to be built as permanent structures. Unlike the second floor of the home in which the family lived and worked, where solid footing underneath was essential, barns were built with flexibility in mind. Many farmers used temporary flooring to store summer harvests. Rather than framing the lofts with full floor joists and covering them with solid decking to make a loft floor, they often employed poles made from saplings to span the distance between girts (supports that run horizontally from post to post). Enough loose boards were placed across this quick joist system to allow farmers to load the ever-rising pile of hay. Less expensive to build, this system allowed for better crop ventilation and added flexibility should the volume of any particular crop vary — although the arrangement certainly made working on top of them all the more interesting. Temporary floors were simply placed where desired and as necessity dictated. Additionally, this loose arrangement allowed farmers to take full advantage of the volume of dry space available. If you imagine trying to pitch loose hay into a room with a fixed ceiling, it isn’t hard to see that the ceiling will quickly get in the way of the work. If, however, you pitch the hay as high as you can and then put the ceiling into place, the work becomes much easier. Much later, farmers invented an overhead trolley system running the length of the barn. A large pair of tongs, or horse forks as they were called, hung from this trolley by block and tackle. The forks could be lowered to pick up huge loads of loose hay from a wagon, then raised to any level and dumped onto mows where desired. Here again, having an open structure was essential. Even later, some farmers built barns into hillsides, which allowed them to drive their wagons in near the top of the barn. They simply tossed the hay downward to fill the mow, eliminating much of the physical effort. With the invention, well into the twentieth century, of hay balers priced for the small farm, permanent floors were often added to older barns or built into new structures, since uniformly shaped bales ended the need for open lofts.

Materials Used to Construct Timber-Framed Barns

The earliest barns were, by necessity, constructed of timbers hewn entirely by hand. In fact, hewn timbers would remain the standard well into the 1800s, depending upon location. Even as water-powered saw mills began to dot the landscape, the frame’s heavy timber was generally hewn into rectangular form by hand — for both economic and logistical reasons. It took simply too much effort to transport heavy logs to distant mills for the four cuts needed to transform them into rectangular forms, before then shipping them back to the building site. Given the weights involved, and the need to move logs with animal power over primitive roads, hewing a timber on the spot and moving it just once to the building’s location saved labor overall. This would remain the case until the advent of balloon construction, in which buildings were made entirely of sawn timber. As one might expect, sawn timber began to make its way into timber-framed barns as saw mills opened throughout New England. Smaller timbers used in the frame, such as wind braces, joists, and eventually common rafters, were the first to replace pieces once hewn. Despite the spread of mills, carpenters preferred to use hewn timbers right into the late nineteenth century.

Until water-powered saw mills could be built locally, planking used for siding, flooring, or as roofers on the barn was ripped by hand. These boards were sawn from logs by what were known as pit saws. Logs were placed on scaffolding, or above a pit dug into the earth. This setup allowed sawyers to use a long, two-handled saw. A person standing on top of the log would both guide the saw blade and pull up, while the person below pulled the blade back down. Together, they ripped the log into planks. As can be imagined, this was a long and laborious task, and another reason why flooring was not used unless entirely necessary. Although water-powered mills with gangs of saw blades eventually took this job out of the pit, planks nevertheless continued to represent a serious financial investment.

The construction of saw mills was an important advancement for any village, as it allowed for the provision of the most essential raw material of the time: lumber. These mills were, of course, more likely to be built along the coast, with its greater population and ready access to materials from abroad.

Using a pit saw. Bruegel, Prudentia, 1559.

While the milling of lumber represented a significant expense, the raw materials were quite common, and thus relatively inexpensive. For early settlers in Connecticut and throughout New England, trees were plentiful. Additionally, wood is one of our most versatile materials. It can be used in countless ways. Beyond the construction of barns and homes, wood appeared in nearly every aspect of a settler’s life: furniture, bridges, wagons, ships, barrels, fences, tools, and, later, at least in myth, even George Washington’s teeth.

As a construction material, wood in early New England had no equal. In fact, wood remained the most important building material in this country until the widespread use of materials such as steel, aluminum, and concrete in the twentieth century. The differing properties of wood from various tree species were put to use in numberless ways. Oaks, being dense and strong, were used to build timber-framed houses, barns, bridges, ships, and equipment that underwent hard use. The conifers found in New England provided a relatively lightweight material once dried — a material that also maintains a high strength to weight ratio. Conifers offered settlers wood that could be used in furniture, flooring, siding, masts, and any number of smaller objects. Effortlessly sawn, quick to season, and easily worked with hand tools, softwoods were also milled into lumber used to make doors, windows, clapboards, and trim. Highly rot resistant black locust was useful for fence posts, and its high tensile strength lent itself well for use in trunnels, the wooden pegs used to fasten timbers together. White cedar, because it is easily worked, weathers well, and swells quickly when dampened, made the best shingles for roofing and siding. Ash and hickory were used as tool handles or in the making of the tool itself. Settlers heated their homes with wood, cooked their food above it, and transported their goods in it. Despite today’s variety and availability of materials, we still largely depend on wood for many of the same things. Steel and aluminum are too expensive for home construction, and who among us doesn’t prefer wooden furniture to plastic? Even the humble wooden shipping crate is lovingly polished and elevated to the status of furniture.

Although certain woods were preferred for specific jobs, every wood imaginable was used in barn construction. Oak was the ideal material for barn framework, given its strength. In general, softwoods were desired for planking stock, as they were light in weight and dried quickly after sawing. Clapboards and shingles were generally made of pine or white cedar. But that said, every one of these materials can be found doing any one of these jobs in New England barns. As time went by and forests disappeared, framers became less finicky about the materials they used. If one type of wood was not available locally, another was substituted. If a stand of pine covered the land upon which the barn was to be constructed, more likely than not the barn was made of pine. There was a beautiful barn in New London, Connecticut, that was framed entirely with black locust. Unfortunately, arsonists demolished it early in the twenty-first century. Connecticut barns are framed with pine, hemlock, chestnut, elm, oaks of all types — and I even found one with timbers of walnut. Unlike today, when materials may be gathered and delivered from locations thousands of miles distant, colonial builders shopped locally, and the nearest tree was often the best tree for the job.

The timber-framing tradition that colonists brought with them to Connecticut had been around for centuries, and with few changes it would last nearly two centuries more. There were two primary reasons for this: the cost of sawn lumber and the cost of iron nails. For early builders, lumber in the form of planks or timber represented a significant cost in both time and labor. Even if sawn by a mill, these boards had to be purchased with either cash or tradable goods. In agrarian societies, cash and the time needed to produce goods beyond those required by the family were often in short supply. Any construction method that reduced the number of components that needed to be paid for was usually preferred.

Lathe-turned trunnel. Note tapered end of trunnel is unusual for most barns. This trunnel was turned for a Shaker barn, thus the refinement. As the holes bored for trunnels were not tapered, blunt ends were generally used.

5.5-inch heavy framing nails down to 1-inch finish nails used to fasten trim. Machines cut these nails starting in the 1790s.

Cut nails are sheared from sheets of metal. Despite having come from the same machine, cut nails are less uniform than modern nails.

Cut finishing nails.

Modern wire nails are cut from spools of wire and quite uniform.

Iron nails were the second limiting factor in barn construction. Nails were very dear in the New World and were used sparingly. While iron, copper, and bronze nails had been around for centuries, they were expensive to make. After ores were found and dug from the earth, they had to be put through the smelting process just to produce base metals — and the smelting process itself took a tremendous amount of energy. It is not hard to imagine the prohibitive cost of heating iron ores to temperatures upward of 2,700 degrees using charcoal as fuel. After the first steps, of simply producing base metals, the nails themselves had to be forged by hand. Making nails from raw stock, one at a time, discouraged frivolous use. Nails were used only when nothing else would do.

It wasn’t until the early 1800s that the price of iron began to drop as furnaces reducing these ores became more efficient. Changes in technology allowed for higher and more consistent temperatures, and the switch to high-energy coal in the smelting process began to make a difference. The first nail-making machines to cut nails from iron sheets were invented in the 1790s. They eventually replaced the need for blacksmiths to forge nails one by one. Despite these changes, the cost of nails remained a limiting factor, and timber framing remained the dominant technology throughout most of Connecticut until after the Civil War, when nails became relatively inexpensive.

The first significant innovation in home and barn construction came, as previously mentioned, with balloon frame construction, the forerunner of the building system we use today for most domestic architecture. In balloon framing, relatively light pieces of wood are joined with inexpensive metal fastenings using comparatively unskilled labor. Rather than laboriously cutting mortise and tenon joints, workers simply cut the wood to the appropriate lengths and nail the pieces together. While there were hundreds of individual pieces that went into the frame of the building, each piece was light in weight and came from a mill ready to use. Signs of what was to come with balloon framing began quite early in cities, where the need for housing was great, but it wasn’t until after the Civil War that this framing method became the new standard.

Timber framing.

Balloon framing eventually ran its course as well. Because of several distinct disadvantages to the technique, it was replaced with today’s system of framing: platform construction. In platform framing, an eight-foot wall is erected and the next floor is built on top of it. This allows carpenters to build the second floor’s walls on that deck. In balloon framing, walls run the full height of the structure, often two or three floors, forcing carpenters to work high in the air. Much longer pieces of wood are required in balloon framing, potentially raising costs. Finally, balloon-framed buildings — up until the addition of fire stops — burned quite rapidly when they caught fire, an obvious hazard. While the timber framing tradition was generally wholly replaced by the late 1800s, there were some exceptions. There is a timber-framed barn on a farm just down the street from where I live that was built by the owner’s father in 1917. Except for the fact that the timbers were sawn and not hewn, the barn looks as though it could have been built any time over the previous hundred years.

Balloon framing.

Platform framing.