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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

Review – An Age of Barns, by Eric Sloane

Eric Sloane is known to many of us who love traditional country things  
as the superb and prolific American artist and author who gave us  
books with good words and even better drawings. Sloane was an  
accidental historian of that era of American life when agriculture was  
king. I cherish my copies of his A Museum of Early American Tools and  
A Reverence For Wood.

The Age of Barns was first published in 1967. I saw this 2001 version  
lying on a table in a friend’s house and begged to borrow it. The sub- 
title is An Illustrated Review of Classic Barn Styles and  
Construction. It is more than that as it also shows silos, root  
cellars, springhouses, sugarhouses, corn cribs and smoke houses. Also  
shown are tools of barn builders, construction methods, types of  
ventilation systems and even hinge design.

Sloane shows the evolution of this most important structure with  
examples large and small and from many places. Medieval, English,  
German, American barns. Small and large log barns. The Appalachian  
overhung-loft barn built on two cribs, decorated Pennsylvania barns, a  
Georgia barn, a Maine barn, a Tennessee saltbox barn. Pent roofs,  
gambrel roofs, extended bays, threshing bays. Connecting barns, built  
so the farmer could do a winter day’s chores without going outside.

I have known two barns intimately. The barn on our Wisconsin farm was  
a classic two-story bank barn built of stone on the lower level with  
hand-hewn posts and beams above, a cupola topping it off. The farmer  
whose death allowed my parents to buy the farm had been an alfalfa  
producer so the barn had huge mows that were filled both from the  
outside using a hay hook and from the inside where teams and wagons  
were taken straight in and through. The dairy herd was housed in the  
lower section next to the sixteen-foot silo. I pulled a lot of, um,  
teats in that barn.

The humble hillbilly barn at Heartwood in Missouri has two sections  
separated by a drive-through. In barns this design is called double- 
crib; in houses it is called a dog-trot. The construction is of hewn  
oak logs with half-dovetail corners. The logs are held off the ground  
only with loose stones, so early deterioration was inevitable. When  
the barn was still in pretty good shape we took a family photo one  
Fourth of July. My cousin and I hung the huge American flag that was  
hand-sewn by a grandmother for Lincoln’s inauguration and we all posed  
in front of it on the ground.

Born in 1905, Eric Sloane died in 1985, walking to a luncheon in his  
honor celebrating his memoir, Eighty: An American Souvenir. His fine  
books will live on long after him, a legacy of focus and craftsmanship.