By Anne Forbes, architectural historian/preservation consultant and a member of the Thoreau Farm Trust Advisory Board,
for the Thoreau Farm Trust's Annual Concord Barn Tour
Editor's Note: The repurposing of old buildings rather than tearing them down for something new is an important aspect of sustainability, and one that some have tried hard to practice in Concord. Adaptive reuse has saved not just the buildings, but a piece of the irreplacable historic character and charm of Concord. It is also fitting to honor these farm buildings in such a way, because if anyone knew about thrift and creative making-do, it was certainly our farmers.
"The four great objects aimed at in barn building are commodious storage for crops, comfortable quarters for stock, convenient performance of labor, and the economical saving and making of manure." George W. Hunt, Lecture to the Concord Farmers Club, 1873.
In a place known for its historic architecture, the barns of Concord's countryside make an important contribution to the town's character and represent three centuries of outbuilding design.
The evolution of Concord's barns follows the general development pattern of barn design in New England. Through the 18th century and into the early 19th, New England farmers built English barns -- of heavy timber-frame, post-and-beam construction, with large hinged doors on the long (eaves) sides of the building. Both their floor plans and their carpentry were a legacy of earlier English building practices. The principal timbers, and often the smaller ones as well, were hand-hewn. Each joint, including the complex "English tie joint" tied together the principal rafters, tie beams, plates, and characteristic flared or "gunstock" posts, was individually crafted -- a method of building known as the "scribe rule."
Toward the middle of the 19th century as Concord entered the progressive farming era, farmers adopted many advances in agricultural methods that included changes in the design of outbuildings. The town was actually at the forefront of some of that progress. Simon Brown, editor of the influential farm journal The New England Farmer, moved to Concord in 1848 and was instrumental in starting the Concord Farmers Club in 1852. Many local farmers joined both the club and the Middlesex Agricultural Society, which had its beginnings in Concord in 1820. Through lectures delivered at the periodic meetings and other exchanges of information, farmers both learned from others' experience and shared some of their own. The 19th-century owners of several barns on the tour gave lectures to the Farmers Club, covering topics ranging from hay cultivation, irrigation, drainage, and manure handling to the economics of farming and the lives of farm women.
English barns were built without cellars, and were sided with boards deliberately spaced wide apart to provide ventilation. Farmer Prescott Hosmer described these buildings in an 1870 essay to the Concord Farmers Club: "The barns of our boyhood were low posted, and so narrow that the drive ways were put in crosswise, for if they had been put through lengthwise, they would have taken up about two thirds of the room; leaving no space for stalls or bays. The sides were usually boarded up & down; leaving cracks an inch wide (more or less) like a corn crib; which was well enough for the preservation of the hay; but not for the comfort of the cattle."
Advances in agriculture associated with sweeping economic and social changes in the early 19th century led to changes in barn architecture that were adopted throughout New England. Better nourishment and improved breeds of cattle, for instance, resulted in bigger animals, and wider market opportunities led to larger dairy herds. Farmers now needed more livestock space in the barn as well as more storage area for the increased amount of hay the animals consumed. While barns still had pegged post-and-beam frames, the longstanding scribe-rule method of building gave way to a system of more standardized and efficient joinery called the "square rule." Efficiency further increased as the old pre-1830 side-door English barns were replaced over the mid-19th century with barns with wagon doors in the gable ends, a building type that came to be known as the New England barn. The interiors of these new buildings were arranged in lengthwise "aisles" (most commonly a center drive aisle flanked by a livestock tie-up along the sunnier south or east side, and a hay mow aisle along the north or west). Readily expandable, they were constructed in a series of "bents" (crosswise framing elements) that could be raised by a group of people, linked fairly quickly together, and finished inside and out as time allowed.
Many of Concord's New England barns are three-aisle barns. They vary in some of their interior features, which include specialized spaces for workshops, grain rooms, horse stalls, and calf pens. Commonly, they are "banked" or "bank" barns, built into the slope of the ground to allow ground-level access, usually from the side, to a cellar underneath, where a pig or two worked over the manure that was shoveled through trap doors from the livestock floor. A series of lofts rising high under the towering roofs maximized the capacity for hay storage. Most of these buildings had heavy sliding doors that rolled on iron wheels, and all had more windows than were common in the older English barns. Various approaches to ventilation, hay handling, feed storage, and manure management are evident in these buildings.
Today, we reflect on the richness of Concord's architectural and agricultural heritage as we honor these venerable buildings and the people who worked in them and with them, and especially those who care for them today. They are part of a great tradition touched upon by Henry David Thoreau in his A Week on the Concord and the Merrimack Rivers when he describes viewing the local landscape from the Concord River system, "It is worth the while to make a voyage up this stream, if ... only to see how much country there is to the rear of us: great hills, and a hundred brooks, and farm-houses, and barns, and haystacks you never saw before, and men everywhere .... "
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