Atop the bare frame of a weather-beaten old barn next to a herd of indifferent Highland cattle, Renard Thompson and Dylan Weidman of Bring Back Barns are hand-operating a winch to lower a massive beam to the earth. The group of timber framers works to restore historic barns of the northeast, cracking open crumbling facades to restore life to centuries-old structures.
“It’s very romantic, it’s very dirty. It's all creative problem solving. So, it's really kind of makeshift engineering, where, especially when you're taking timbers down or you're repairing them in place, you have to figure out how to keep it all standing while you're taking major structural members out," Weidman told WAMC. “Often, we'll be opening up a joint or a mortise, and it hasn't seen the light of day in 250 years, and you see the work that the old carpenters did, and they make some of the same mistakes that we do sometimes. You just feel their presence.”
As far as anyone can tell, this barn dates back to 1815.
“And we know that from the nail types," explained Bring Back Barns owner and operator Thompson, a devotee of traditional barn crafting techniques. “There are four types of nails that were commonly used in this country, And the first was hand-wrought by a blacksmith, pounding into a swage on top of an anvil, red hot iron. And then around 1790 plus, they invented nail-making machines, which, they took a sheet of iron and chopped out the nails from that and they put a head on them. The first type of nail was only used until about 1815, then they got a much superior type of cut nail. And this barn is all built with those cut nails.”
Since the 1990s, this particular barn has been in the hands of The Nature Conservancy, a global titan in the environmental nonprofit world.
“The Cande Barn- So, that's the Cande family. Really big name down here. If you went down here, I could show you the cemetery down here with Zaccheus Cande in it, Revolutionary War veteran," said land steward Rene Wendell, who oversees more than 8,400 acres of Nature Conservancy holdings in Western Massachusetts. “Where the Cande Barn is located, it's right in our Schenob Brook Preserve, which is close to 3,000 acres. Ecologically speaking, it's probably the most diverse place in all of Massachusetts. There's more rare, endangered in special plants and animals and insects down here than any other place than all of Massachusetts.”
Over the centuries, the Cande Barn has been used for agriculture and cider making, survived a prior move to its present location at the southern fringe of Berkshire County in the 80s, and was serving as a repository for a pool cleaning business when the Nature Conservancy took it over in the ’90s.
Its new owner says it wasn’t love at first sight.
“If anybody looked at it now, it is a disaster. I mean, it is just a mess," Sally Harris told WAMC. "The holes, all the sides are falling down- And when I got here, the first time I sought it out and found it, it looked horrible.”
Harris, along with her husband Fred, is answering the Nature Conservancy’s call for someone to take over the decrepit barn. With conservation restrictions on the current property, that means moving the structure to a new location.
“And so it was almost like, well, forget that," Harris continued. "The only way to get in was to go up on a ladder to crawl in. And I didn't have a ladder, but I held up my phone and I took pictures of the roof. So, the first time I saw it, I saw it just by pictures that I took by holding my camera over my head, and they were so beautiful. The structure of the interior of it was so good, and having had some experience in restoration, I knew that all these other things were just extraneous and they shouldn't be there, and that it could come back and do something wonderful, and be more simple and pure to what it was originally.”
Piece by piece, Thompson and his Bring Back Barns crew are delicately dismantling the hand-hewn barn to move it to the Harris’s property in Egremont just up the road.
“We're bringing it back to that life," he said. "We're going to put a wood floor in the entire thing, and when you look up about 12 feet up, you'll see these big, beautiful timbers and then the rafters forming kind of a cathedral-like sense.”
The Harrises previously restored the stone church St. James Place in Great Barrington, which reopened as a community space in 2017.
“It's a beautiful church," Harris said. "It was built in 1857 and the parish house in 1910, and it was going to turn into a parking lot on Main Street. So, my husband and I created a 501c3 nonprofit to restore the building and to repurpose it as a community asset. The People's Pantry of South County is in the building. We have arts groups, we have all kinds of things.”
Harris says taking charge of forgotten gems like the Cande Barn is a privilege. Past its present ramshackle exterior, she says she can see its new future.
“These are treasures," she told WAMC. "You just don't want to tear them down in the middle of the night. I mean this, it's hard to look at this one and call it a treasure- You have to look inside.”
