Behind the barn restoration at the Farm at Prophetstown
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Behind the barn restoration at the Farm at Prophetstown
“It’s iconic, really. … So we knew we had to do it right.” Farm at Prophetstown encourages people to come see the progress ahead of an event called ‘fundRAISE the Barn’
Thanks to Purdue Convocations, sponsoring today’s Based in Lafayette. Happy Labor Day! Today is the final day to save $5 on the biggest shows of the season with the Convos Back to School Sale! “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Live in Concert” combines live orchestra, turntables, and electronics with a screening of the Academy Award-winning film. Broadway tours stopping in West Lafayette include Tina Fey's “Mean Girls,” Tony Award-winning musical comedy “Hairspray,” the remarkable true story “Come From Away” — the small town in Newfoundland that opened their homes to 7,000 stranded travelers on 9/11, and “Shrek The Musical” — based on the beloved DreamWorks animated film. Buy tickets here.
BEHIND THE BARN RESTORATION AT THE FARM AT PROPHETSTOWN
Work is expected to continue into the first weeks of September on the reconstruction of the barn at the center of the Farm at Prophetstown, as the nonprofit organization that runs the working homestead at the state park prepares for a fundraising event later this month.
“It’s iconic, really,” Lee Goudy, the Farm’s executive director, said about the red, gambrel barn.
“It’s what you see first at the Farm. It’s what photographers concentrate on when they come here,” Goudy said. “We knew this was going to be a big project, so we knew we had to do it right. We have a chance to preserve it for another 100 years.”
The 40-by-80-foot barn, standing 34 feet tall, was erected in 2001, among the first features at the Farm at Prophetstown, a working farm meant to showcase rural life in the 1920s, as agriculture in rural Indiana was transitioning from horse-drawn power to electrification and early tractors. The barn followed a pair of homes recalling Sears Roebuck kit houses from that era – one a replica and the other one donated and moved from Lafayette to the park near Battle Ground.
Goudy said the siding on the barn – assembled from two barns from southern Indiana that date to the early 20th century – was starting to rot. In places, the poplar boards had been cut at the bottom and replaced painted cement board to try to slow the deterioration. But Goudy said the work, while it bought a little time, wasn’t going to last long and didn’t do preservation and aesthetics efforts at the Farm much good.
The Farm at Prophetstown brought experts in barn restoration to size up the structure. Goudy said they were assured that the decay in the outside boards hadn’t caused leaks that affected beams and rest of the barn. The foundation was in good shape. And the metal roof installed when the two barns were combined was in good shape, too, keeping things dry.
Replacing the board and batten siding, along with doors and gutters, presented an $80,000 project.
“It’s a lot,” Goudy said. “But we’re preserving something, we feel, that is being lost across Indiana.”
Mark Hufford with Peg & Pin LLC, a Cutler-based construction company that preserves barns, said he’s in three to five barns a week, checking how the structures were modified over the decades by farmers who were using materials and methods that were easily at hand to make repairs and keep their livestock and hay storage under roof.
“In our line of work, we can’t save all the barns we’re in,” Hufford said. “We try to save as many as we can.”
Last week, roughly halfway through what’s supposed to be a 45-day project, a crew from Peg & Pin were pulling individual boards and replacing them with 1-by-10 boards, 16 feet apiece, and accompanying battens milled in southern Indiana. Hufford said work was being done in sections so the barn is still in full use for the farm’s two horses, two goats, cattle, chickens and a barn cat name Shiloh. New coats of barn red paint, matched against the old barn boards, would go on as the project progressed.
Hufford said barns of this vintage are being lost each year, whether they’re damaged and not replaced or just too expensive for owners to want to save them against the slow ravages of time. He said that the most frequent option is to skip boards and clad old barns in metal. It’s cheaper that way, Hufford said.
“What they’re doing here,” Hufford said, “is keeping it real. That makes this is a really fun project for us.”
Goudy said that’s been the point for such a prominent part of a living history site. He said that with barns going by the wayside, the Farm at Prophetstown sees a greater importance in making sure one with such good bones lasts, offering a spot for people to visit and see how things were a century ago.
Goudy encouraged people to come watch the reconstruction in the next few weeks. He said pieces of the barn, including doors, would be available as auction items leading up to and during an event called “fundRAISE the Barn” on Sept. 23. The Farm at Prophetstown has a goal to raise $20,000 during the event to help pay for restoration costs.
“When you drive into the park, this barn is what you see first,” Goudy said. “We want everyone to come see it up close.”
IF YOU GO
“fundRAISE the Barn” will be 6 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 23, at the Farm at Prophetstown, part of Prophetstown State Park, 3534 Prophetstown Road, Battle Ground. The night will include music from the Scott Greeson Trio, the Bum Ditty Barn Dance Band, square dancing with a live caller, silent auctions and kids’ activities. Event tickets are $30 for adults, $15 for children 4-12 and free for children younger than 4. Tickets are available at: prophetstown.org
The Farm at Prophetstown is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. daily. Admission is free with the Prophetstown State Park gate fee ($8 for those with Indiana plates, $10 for out-of-state). For more information, go to: prophetstown.org.
OTHER READS …
Purdue’s season opening loss to Fresno State, 39-35, at Ross-Ade Stadium was a bit hard to swallow in football coach Ryan Walters’ Boilermaker debut. Here were a few reads following that one:
J&C reporter Sam King: “Purdue football 'not going to let one game define us' after Fresno State loss.”
King also offered some rough grades:
Indy Star columnist Gregg Doyel: “0-1 start for Ryan Walters not what anyone at Purdue wanted, but better days ahead.”
Gold and Black reporter Tom Dienhart: “Ten observations: Purdue-Fresno State.”
And looking ahead to next week’s game at Virginia Tech, here’s Gold and Black’s Mike Carmin:
There were tributes galore to Jimmy Buffett over the weekend, and rightly so, after news came out that he’d died. Among the takes was this one from Washington Post reporter Kim Bellware, looking at Buffett’s signature hit, starting here: “No one knows the coordinates of the mythical ‘Margaritaville,’ but real-word origins of Jimmy Buffett’s most famous song began at a Mexican restaurant in Texas and ended with a car crash in Key West.” It’s worth a read: “Jimmy Buffett’s hangover hit ‘Margaritaville’ made him a mogul.”
Thanks, again, to Purdue Convocations for sponsoring today’s Based in Lafayette. Save $5 on the biggest shows of the season with the Convos Back to School Sale. Buy tickets here.
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Behind the barn restoration at the Farm at Prophetstown
If they had a sense of humor they could have made that yellow port-a-potty look like an outhouse. Missed opportunity.