Subject: [Homestead] Review – An Age of Barns, by Eric Sloane
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2008 05:53:49 -0700
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.
[Homestead] Review – An Age of Barns, by Eric Sloane,
Gene GeRue, 01/28/2008