The old barns scattered across our countryside are the iconic backdrop to Canada’s rural heritage, yet comparatively little has been documented about them. Studying the structure and style of a barn can enrich our understanding of rural life, and how farming has evolved over time. In this episode, author and Ontario Barn Preservation President Hugh Fraser shares the unique qualities of the historic swing beam barns of early Niagara.
The old barns scattered across our countryside are the iconic backdrop to Canada’s rural heritage, yet comparatively little has been documented about them. Studying the structure and style of a barn can enrich our understanding of rural life, and how farming has evolved over time. In this episode, author and Ontario Barn Preservation President Hugh Fraser shares the unique qualities of the historic swing beam barns of early Niagara.
[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:09] ANNOUNCER: Do you love old barns as much as we do? Then you're in luck, because we're going back to the farm today. Welcome to The Open Door, presented by The Brown Homestead in the heart of the beautiful Niagara Peninsula.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:00:26] AH: Maybe it's just me, but I can't get enough of old barns. One of my favourite early memories is visiting the farm that belonged to my great grandparents, William and Nelly Brown in Wainfleet. Exploring the nooks and crannies of their old barn, I vividly remember the sound of the cows from below, the rays of light from between the barn boards cutting through the dusty air, and the old barn cat who I quickly learned did not like to be picked up. Even today, I'm notorious for taking the long way home to swing through some unexplored rural part of Niagara, looking for old farmhouses and barns, each with the promise of generations worth of stories.
Like I said, maybe it's just me. But today, sitting across the table from Hugh Fraser, I tend to think otherwise. Hugh grew up on a dairy farm, probably not unlike the Brown dairy farms in Wainfleet and Pelham, and he's an advocate for farmers and family farms and the challenges they face in the shadow of urban growth, and he loves barns. In fact, he wrote the book on barns, literally. Welcome Hugh.
[0:01:22] HF: Thank you. Great to be here.
[0:01:24] AH: It's great to have you. I've been looking forward to this conversation ever since I discovered your book a couple of years ago. Now, before we get into our discussion about early barns, it's important to remember that Niagara was an agricultural area, even before the Loyalists or even the early French settlers arrived.
[0:01:41] HF: Correct. That's right. The neutral Indians lived here and were actually pretty good farmers. Unfortunately, they disappeared around 1650 through many reasons. After that, for about 150 years, the area here rewilded, I think that's the term, and some of the trees kept on growing and got bigger. And when the first United Empire Loyalists came up here before 1800, they saw forests of magnificently huge trees, they were cut down, turned into barns and houses, and many other things.
[0:02:18] AH: I love the old stories you hear from the settler days of the really magnificent old-growth forests and so on that we don't think of today because so much of the peninsula has been cultivated. Of course, the Loyalist migration, as you touched on began with the Niagara Purchase of 1781 and the subsequent Between the Lakes Treaty, which was reaffirmed in 1792 when the British government acquired the Niagara Peninsula and other lands that paved the way for the settlement of those Loyalists. The Americans who had sided with the British during the Revolutionary War, now, most of them were farmers, and they began as you said, to cut down the trees and cultivate the land. But early Loyalist agriculture was considerably different than what we find today.
[0:03:02] HF: Back in those days, the big crop was wheat. They had to get wheat into the ground for many different reasons. One was it was simply a staple of the diet, and it also gave them cash, ready cash. Cash was scarce back in those days. And it was worth a lot more than even wheat is today in today's dollars. Yes, so they got wheat into the ground as quickly as they could.
[0:03:23] AH: Of course, that type of farming requires lots of storage space, which meant some nice big barns, and as the title of your book suggests, Swing Beam Barns of Niagara, focuses on a certain type of barn, which you say was very much a product of that time.
[0:03:37] HF: Yes. It's interesting. Not a lot of people actually realize that these early barns were called swing beam barns. I've met some people who do know what that means. But they were built for the wheat industry to first thresh wheat on the threshing floor of that barn and they could store the grain and granaries adjacent to the threshing floor.
[0:04:00] AH: It always amazes me when you get the opportunity to walk through one of those really early barns that those early settlers were actually able to build them. They're so magnificent, and the scale is quite incredible, and that's characteristic of those early barns, isn't it?
[0:04:15] HF: Yes. They brought that technology, that building technology from New Jersey, and New York, and Pennsylvania because they already had those barns down there. You'll find older swing beam barns down in the New Jersey area built in the 1700s. We don't have any that old here, but they were built here anywhere from maybe 1810, up to as late as around 1880.
[0:04:41] AH: Now, if you're lucky enough to find yourself looking through an old barn, what do you look for to determine whether or not it was a swing beam barn?
[0:04:48] HF: Okay. So, what I normally tell people is go up to the long side of the barn. Okay. So, the long wall of the barn, go into the big door. Generally, that door is about 12 feet by 12 feet. It could be a couple of doors. Walk into that area, walk onto the threshing floor, and look up to your right, or look up to your left, and in some special barns both sides, there would be a swing beam. That swing beam will be the biggest beam in the barn, and beams run horizontally, just so we're clear on that. Posts run vertically and beams run horizontally. It'll be the biggest beam in the barn, and it'll be only supported at its ends.
That would give the farmers a wide-open space to process and thresh their wheat, or other grains. But it would be just like you putting a steel beam into your kitchen and opening up the whole house. It gives you a clear area, big area to work. And at some barns where there's two swing beams, it could be a huge area that's wide open.
[0:05:59] AH: Now, one of the things I love about your book is that it's not just an inventory of 50 really wonderful local barns, but you really also embraced the stories that those barns embody. What the description of the barn’s historical research, but even the fictionalized vignettes to give a flavour of the time. Why is that important to you?
[0:06:17] HF: It's interesting. I was trying to find some way. I didn't initially plan on putting stories together on these barns. But I thought is there some way that I can make these barns come alive for people? I don't know, in the middle of night, one time, it came to me, I got to write some kind of a little story about each one. Because I thought that people would be mostly interested in pictures and schematics and stuff. Then, I found out after I wrote the book that people were actually more interested in the stories.
So, the way I describe the book is, it starts off with every chapter, 50 chapters start off with an imagined dialogue between the owner of the barn, and somebody who's a friend or family member about something going on locally when the barn is being built. It could be something as simple as somebody's going to school for the first time. Or it could be something about that's going on about the price of wheat these days. So, my barn owners witness and participate in history as it unfolds around them.
[0:07:23] AH: And it gives people opportunity to understand the way of life and connect with history in a more relatable, tangible way, which we love to do here with the podcast, and at The Brown Homestead.
[0:07:32] HF: It's been very interesting hearing people's response, as I say, “Don't you like the drawings and everything?” “Oh, I liked the drawings and the photos and everything. But I really liked your stories.”
[0:07:42] AH: Yes, the ones you've written, but also the implicit ones, when you see how something was built and why it was built in. Of course, they weren't always built the same way, and something you do in the book is you break down the barns by the era in which they were built, each having certain characteristics that reflect the time span in which was built. So, let's start with the early era, or as you call it, the single-component swing beam barns.
[0:08:05] HF: Yes, so I struggled at first of trying to find out is there a way that I can categorize these barns, and I broke them into three categories. The early ones, the mid-era ones, and the late-era ones. The difference between them, essentially, is this. The early era of barns had the biggest swing beams, and not surprisingly, that because the big trees were still around when they built them. And the late era barns had smaller swing beams, and smaller components in their swing beam bents. And a bent is a framing member of the barn. They had to do that because they had more members in their bents because it got harder to make the barn strong enough with dwindling size of trees. So, that's basically what the differences are.
[0:08:58] AH: I love how you mentioned that the early barns were often the simplest construction and held together by the sheer brute force of the mass of timbers.
[0:09:07] HF: The deepest one I've seen here in Niagara is 28 inches, still an awfully big timber, and comes from a really old tree that probably was close to 200 years old. But again, the earlier barns they had the pick of the big trees, and thank goodness they actually had a way to preserve these masterpieces in these barns, because those pieces of timber don't exist anywhere else anymore.
[0:09:33] AH: Yes, simply not to be found. Even then, it would have been a challenge because you walk through the woods today and look around at the trees. Those timbers had to not just be thick and strong, they had to be straight.
[0:09:44] HF: Yes. The early barns and early trees back in those days, I'm told by people who are timber framers. They say those trees were stronger than they would have been today with the same girth because they grew more slowly. They weren't cultivated, so to speak, in a modern way.
[0:10:02] AH: I can vouch for that because here at The Brown Homestead, that John Brown house was built with similar timbers being a very old house. The beams, this house is constructed of, are a lot of the same old hand-hewn timbers, and whenever we have to work with them, we realize that they're much heavier and harder and denser than any wood you can find these days. It’s one of the challenges of doing heritage work is just because you have something made of oak, you can't replace it with oak, because the oak today isn't the same as the oak that the farmers were cutting down in the 1800s, early 1800s.
So, now, another characteristic, I understand of those early barns, was they tended to be built directly on the ground.
[0:10:40] HF: Yes. They were known as ground barns. They were built, now not directly on the ground, but their frame would have sat on what I call field stone piers. They would have been just flat stones big enough to put underneath the post, to support the weight of the barn. They would typically be anywhere from a foot off the ground, to maybe two feet off the ground. So, that's the way most of those barns were built early.
You have to remember there was not really a livestock industry back in the early 1800s. Yes, the settlers of European descent did have animals, and they might have had a cow or two, a few pigs, some chickens, but they weren't milking 25 cows in those days. Those days didn't happen until maybe the last quarter of the 19th century. So, a lot of these ground barns got actually turned into two-storey basement barns, often around 1990 or 1890, sorry, 1890 and 1900. They were jacked up, and they put a staple underneath those barns. Remarkable to think about, but those pioneers weren't afraid to work – they weren't afraid – they weren't in any hurry, and they just did it right. They did everything just right.
[0:12:02] AH: That takes us to the beginning of that transition from the early era to the mid-era. You refer to the mid-era barns as multi-component. And that evolution began probably in the mid-1830s. What exactly is involved in that transition to multicomponent barns?
[0:12:19] HF: They started adding more timbers to the frames. There were more vertical struts. There were more braces. Then, when they went to the late-era ones, they started seeing a lot more braces, a lot more diagonal braces, because they just simply had to make those bents stronger, and the barn started getting wider in those days. The early barns typically were about 30 feet wide. Some of the later barns got up to – the widest swing beam barn I've ever witnessed is 46 feet wide, which is an awful long span for a swing beam. So, they had to find ways to make them stronger.
[0:13:00] AH: My impression, and you can tell me if I'm correct on this, but part of that transition was a reflection of the late Loyalists, especially a lot of the Mennonites who were coming up from the Northeast United States, bringing with them a different approach and a little more technology.
[0:13:15] HF: Yes. That's correct. So, there were people here. They had a lot of contact with people down and in the States, even though they were up here as United Empire Loyalists, and even the late Loyalists that came up here later, they still had contact down there. And swing beam barns are uniquely North American. They you do not see this technology over in Europe. It's just a uniquely North American thing.
[0:13:41] AH: So now, as we move into the late era then, I take it that it was more a matter of the construction becoming more complex.
[0:13:50] HF: Yes, just much more complex. Easily three to four times as many timbers in the bents than there would have been in some of the early barns. Some of the early barns, all they would have as a tie beam and a swing beam and maybe one vertical strut. Whereas when you got into some of these late-era ones, there could be a tie beam, a couple of vertical struts, the swing beam, some other half-tie beams. So, there were lots of members in those things to make those barns stronger.
[0:14:23] AH: Now, you mentioned some of the early ones were later jacked up onto foundations to create that lower floor. I presume at this point too, some we're being built directly that way as well. That more typical barn look we see today with the Ray Stone Foundation and the barn on top, the wood on top.
[0:14:39] HF: Yes, that's correct. Started seeing some of those basement barns around the 1840s. They were purposely built that way. They weren't jacked up. This was to let the opportunity for having animals downstairs, beef cattle, and some dairy cows, not too many. They still were not much of a livestock industry even at that that time. They’re still was not much livestock industry, the way we understand it today.
[0:15:07] AH: But farmers were more likely to own some livestock, even simple farmers, whereas in the early days, you often hear stories of three different families buying a horse together and sharing it.
[0:15:17] HF: That's correct. Yes, in the early, early days, oxen actually outnumbered horses. And then over time, horses started outnumbering oxen. But believe it or not, from what I've read, there's actually more horses today than there were back in the 1800s. Even though they were used for travel and for working. We just have a lot more pleasure horses here today than we ever had before.
[0:15:41] AH: They probably, like the people don't work quite as hard as the old ones.
[0:15:44] HF: No.
[0:15:48] AH: Now, let’s talk about some of the individual barns in the book, and we've picked a few that are really, really fantastic and happened to be fairly close to the Homestead here. Now, we are going to be a little bit vague in terms of talking about where they are just for the sake of privacy of the owners, and so on. But people who love barns, they may even know a couple of the ones we're talking about, but they can keep that to themselves. We'll start with what you've called the Kings Highway Barn.
[0:16:12] HF: Correct. Yes. So, I wrote about that barn. It's on the, what is surprisingly called the Kings Highway. Highway 8 are now known as Regional Road 81. It was an old indigenous trail at one time, and there would have been an awful lot of traffic on that road, because it was the main thoroughfare from Hamilton to the falls, or at least to the Niagara River. So, I wrote about that, I wrote a story there about one of the owners or the owner wanting to have a market at the road because it was such a busy road. That particular barn has two swing beams in it, remarkable barn. When I first was in that barn, I didn't realize it had two swing beams, because one of them was missing. It was actually installed, had been removed and taken out, and somehow flipped over and put on the other side of the threshing floor, where it had been but lower than before. I was lucky enough to convince the owner that he should maybe put that swing beam back where it used to be. And he has actually put it back where it used to be. A lot of work, but it looks fantastic.
[0:17:26] AH: And kudos to them for that, because that probably was not easy.
[0:17:30] HF: No, it was not easy and it costs money. But it's interesting, one of the things that I've learned is that through writing this book, is that a lot of people have actually saved their barns based on my book. They didn't realize what they had. And they decided you know what, we're going to invest the money in this thing. Because almost nobody realizes what kind of barn they have until you show it to them. Just about nobody. I'm always shocked at how I can show people things that they've never seen in their barn before. Now, I know what I'm looking for, of course, so I can find things.
[0:18:10] AH: Once you connect them to that history, then they become more passionate about it, which is a great, great thing. Now, the Kings Highway barn, you wrote what you believe was built by Peter Smith.
[0:18:21] HF: That's correct. Peter Smith. I believe that to be true based on registry records, and when I believe that barn was built. It's a bit of a, it's not a guess, but an educated guess. A professional judgment on when these barns were being built based on their construction method, and who was likely the owner at the time when they built them. So, I believe it was him, yes.
[0:18:45] AH: And around 1835 is your estimate on this one?
[0:18:48] HF: Yes. That was based on, mostly, on the size of the swing beams. Generally speaking, the larger the swing beam, the older the barn. That's not perfect, but it's pretty much what works.
[0:19:01] AH: Of course, as you have mentioned at times, the barns aren’t necessarily sitting today where they started.
[0:19:08] HF: No. That's right. A lot of barns got moved for many reasons. And moved is to say, what do you mean move? They were taken down? No, they rolled them. They actually dragged them on rollers. They would drag them on big round trees that they could roll. They would take them – there was one farm I dealt with, they said, “Oh yes, my great, great grandfather moved this barn about a mile. They'd had a fire and they needed a barn so they decided they'd take one from one of the brother’s places and move it a mile.” Which is remarkable.
You also have to remember, around the 1850s the railway came through here, and they didn't draw a line that just happened to miss barns. They must have gone through some barns and so they must have moved some barns to accommodate the railway, and I'm convinced that some people actually wanted to be right beside the railway, and they might have actually moved closer to the railway.
[0:20:08] AH: Now, of course, moving a barn also, it didn't mean it was moved in its entirety, and it's very normal these days to find a barn that was built in, let's say the early 1900s and discover some much older timbers inside of it.
[0:20:21] HF: Yes. A lot of barns contain recycled timbers because why would you throw 12 by 12 beam that’s 60 feet long? You wouldn't do it. So, they repurposed the materials all the time in barns.
[0:20:37] AH: Another barn in the book that I was quite taken with is a transitional barn, I think, maybe between early and mid-era, which is that Samuel Beckett barn.
[0:20:45] HF: Yes. He had a beautiful barn in Effingham. It has a very large swing beam in it. The barn is 36 feet wide. It's in very good shape. It has pinned floors in it. So, the floorboards on the threshing floor are actually pinned with wood, which is wood pins, which is the way they were early done. I believe that barn also may have tongue and groove threshing floor. And in the old days, the very early barns, and this is one way of dating the barns, the threshing floor tongue and groove boards were not like we have today with tongue and groove, with a tongue on one side and a groove on the other. They were actually grooved on both sides. Then, they would hammer a spline down in between the two adjacent boards. That's the way the early boards were done. I've seen a number of barns like that, and that's a telltale sign that it's an old barn.
The other thing that's in that barn is – and it's a ground barn. The other thing that's in there is a wagon rack lifter. And many, many barns had wagon rack lifters with a great big pulley, axles, ropes, and horses would actually pick up the entire rack off of the wagon gear and lift it into the air so that they could pitch off wheat sheaves for storage, and later threshing, or later on loose hay.
[0:22:21] AH: It's interesting you mentioned that about the floorboards because that's something I learned about here at the Homestead. Our floorboards in the attic are also dubbed doubleton, double grew. I asked our heritage carpenter who brought that. I said, “Why would that be?” He said, “Well, because making the tongues took more skill than making the grooves.” So, what happened was the carpenter would do tongues on both sides, and the apprentice would do grooves on both sides. That way, they didn't have to pass the boards back and forth. So, that's a little bit that we learned here.
I'm not surprised too that Beckett's barn had a little more sophisticated floor system, which is probably one of the benefits of owning your own sawmill, which he did. If you know the history of Effingham, then you know that Effingham was originally called Beckett's Mills, because of course, that's where Beckett had his mills. So, it was quite an industrial centre he had going on there, and the fact that the barn still exists is really a remarkable remnant of that.
[0:23:14] HF: One other feature in that barn that's interesting, as you can tell that at one point, there were horses housed in that barn. There are vertical round bars spaced out, maybe five inches, something like that, so the horses could reach through and get hay or grain. And over the years, they had chewed and licked those spindles into little toothpicks almost, which is kind of interesting.
[0:23:40] AH: Yes. Another little moment in the life of the barn, for sure. Another interesting barn in your book is the Adam's Barn or as people today would know it as Hernder Estate Winery Barn.
[0:23:52] HF: Correct. Yes. Unfortunately, not there anymore, because it had a catastrophic fire there a couple of years back. It's gone. Very interesting barn. A late-era barn, kind of a transitional barn from the early days into now a gambrel-shaped barn, which is the more traditional roof of a, what you might call an Old MacDonald's barn. That's a double-sloped roof. The early swing beam barns were all gable roof, much like your house would be a gable roof, or most houses anyway. But that barn was, I believe, built as a gambrel around, well, 1867.
[0:24:37] AH: Mm-hmm. Which would be a unique feature of that barn, and of course, it had been used as a wedding and conference venue. So, it should have been modified somewhat before it sadly was damaged.
Now, I'm going to transition to a barn that's an earlier barn. It's not actually in your book, but it's one we've been talking about lately. And it's not even from Niagara, but it's still one of my favorites of the bunch, because it's the barn that's going to be moved to The Brown Homestead next year, and that's the Eckardt Barn. And the original location of that barn, for people who are not aware of it, was the Berczy’s settlement and German immigrant William Berczy established a settlement in 1794, which later became the town of Markham.
Berczy, who was an interesting fellow. He was also a painter who actually painted a well-known 1807 portrait of Joseph Brant, that's in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. The barn itself was owned by Phillip Eckardt, who were long-time residents of the Berczy settlement and acquired the property where the barn was located around 1808. They were among the early pioneers to the settlement from Pennsylvania. And Philip Eckardt was a millwright and a carpenter, who helped build and care for a lot of the mills in that area along the Don River, which of course, makes his own personal barn much more interesting.
[0:25:57] HF: Yes. So, I've seen some of the plans for that barn. It's, I think, going to be a very nice addition to this property here. It's a little different than some of the swing beam barns that I've seen, and there's no evidence yet that it is a swing beam barn. But looking at the plans, I'd be shocked if it wasn't. That's the way I look at it. I'd be shocked if it wasn't a swing beam barn. And considering that they took over that property in 1808, it would not surprise me if this was a swing beam barn with a massive swing beam. Some of the – I think I see some mortise openings on some of the photos that I've seen. That might suggest that it might actually been a place for a swing beam, which no longer is there. Again, I've even sketched out what I think it might even look like and so I'll be happy to take a look at it when it finally arrives here.
[0:26:53] AH: When it does, we're going to have definitely take a close look, because I love the opportunity to learn something new about it. And it wouldn't be surprising if it had the swing beam removed. We know there were other modifications. It's also an example of a barn that was probably originally a ground barn that was raised up onto a foundation later as well.
[0:27:12] HF: Yes. There's no question in my mind that that was a ground barn at one time. And I think some of the reports I've seen on it, say the same thing. You can tell if it was a ground barn based on looking at the timbers for the floor. When you're standing down in the new basement, you can look up and there's signs you can tell. It will tell you whether it was originally a ground barn or not.
[0:27:37] AH: So, we're going to have a lot of fun exploring that. I'm not going to put you on the spot for an estimated construction date until you've had a chance to look at it a little bit more closely.
[0:27:46] HF: Well, based on what I see right now on that thing and the size of the timbers, the orientation of things, it would not surprise me if that barn could have been built around 1815. It would not surprise me. That would be one of the earliest, if not the earliest swing beam barns that I've been in.
[0:28:04] AH: Wow. So now, I want to get it here sooner. You're getting me going. We've talked about some of the barns in the book, and for anyone who would like to take a look, I encourage you to get your own copy of Swing Beam Barns of Niagara, which you can get it by going to www.otbfarmsolutions.ca. It's a fantastic book. And of course, it's a starting point. You're working on a second book, aren’t you?
[0:28:28] HF: I am doing a second book. I've just seen so many beautiful barns that I couldn't help myself. Decided I would do it again. As my wife says, I've got to stop finding new barns because I got to start writing. But I now have about 50 more barns and some of them are remarkable and stories that you'd be surprised that I'm writing about.
[0:28:51] AH: Mm-hmm. If we can, I wouldn't mind touching on a couple of those because they're very familiar to us. Just to the west of us, of course, is the Henry of Pelham Family Estate Winery, which is really a historic site unto itself. A lot of people don't know that the tasting room there is an old tavern. Actually, it became a tavern when the Brown house where we're sitting here right now, stopped being a tavern. They opened up down the street there. The property originally was owned by Nicholas Smith, the ancestor of the current Speck brothers who owned the winery. And like John Brown, he was a butler's ranger and a neighbour to John Brown. Also, a witness on John Brown as well. Can you give us a little peek ahead at the book and what's exciting to you about that barn?
[0:29:34] HF: It's exciting because it's a double swing beam barn. It has swing beams on either side of the threshing floor. So, the entire barn is basically clear span, which is unique in itself. It's a late-era barn, so it's probably built in the 1850s. But it's just magnificent. The Henry of Pelham, the brothers, the Specks are renovating so that it can be actually enjoyed by the public as part of their experience over at the winery. So, that's going to be interesting because it's really nice for people to be able to see these buildings.
[0:30:11] AH: I've been lucky enough to have a sneak peek at the work they're doing over there. And it's really – it is going to be really quite wonderful. So, I encourage people to go take a look at that when it's ready and get a tasting. Because some of my personal favourite wine comes from our neighbours and friends over there at Henry of Pelham.
[0:30:30] HF: Well, you have to know that when the Speck brothers do something, they do it right. So, it's going to look nice.
[0:30:34] AH: Absolutely. I think you'll see that when you visit, for sure. The other barn I was thinking about, it belongs to our friends and neighbors just to the north, the Wiley family. Ironically, I have sitting in front of me a copy of your book that Dave Wiley loaned me, and I'm overdue to return that to him. So, I apologize, Dave. Hopefully, I’ll have that back to you before you'll hear this. And the Wileys are another historic Niagara family. But that farm was once owned by the Browns.
[0:31:04] HF: Yes. That's also an interesting barn. It has a massive, massive swing beam in there. I was surprised to learn that it even had a swing beam barn. Actually, they have a couple of swing beam barns. There's another one further down the road that I'm not including in my next book. The one on their home place, yes, I'm including it. I haven't dated that one yet. But it's probably in the 1840s.
[0:31:29] AH: That's an interesting timing because it was in 1841 when Adam Brown who was the son of John and Magdalena bought that 100 acres for Marian Freeman Swayze. And then when Adam died in 1855, he left the Homestead to his youngest son, Jacob, and parts of it to his daughters. But it was the oldest son, John, who inherited that farm and he lived there until 1872 and he passed it on to his nephew, Adam Smith. So, it sounds like your guess, at this point, is it was during that John Brown period, the grandson of our John Brown, who, when he was living there in the barn.
[0:32:04] HF: Good. I hope so. When you're dating barns, everybody wants to know how exactly. You can never get these exact, but I find you have to come at it from 10 different directions, and look at all the different features, and what have you found in other barns. And then, you just make an educated guess and best professional judgment on what the date is. Never going to be perfect, but that's just the way it is.
[0:32:31] AH: Well, just to give you a little bit of help in your research is, Freeman Swayze never actually lived on that property. So, when John Brown bought it or moved there in 1840, he probably was the first resident. It sounds like it would make sense. He would need a barn and sounds like your timing is pretty straight. Pretty bang-on.
[0:32:47] HF: Good. That's good. That just saved me a couple of hours of guesswork or –
[0:32:53] AH: We'll compare notes. If we can help with the research, we would absolutely love to and we love hearing the stories that you've uncovered as well. It's been a great conversation today, Hugh. Thank you very much.
[0:33:04] HF: You're very welcome. I've enjoyed – I just love talking about old barns, as you know, and I don't know if you knew this, but I'm actually current president of Ontario Barn Preservation.
[0:33:14] AH: That's right. I didn't know that.
[0:33:16] HF: So, I recommend that anybody who's listening to this, go on our website, ontariobarnpreservation.com, I believe it is. Tons of information in there about how to preserve your barn, how to enjoy your barn, how to connect with other people who like old barns. I've learned that an awful lot of people like old barns just like me.
[0:33:38] AH: And as challenging as it is to take care of an old house, it’s just less information about taking care of an old barn, and definitely will put that link up on the episode page for this for this episode so people can find that. Because people who need that information really, really do need it. And just another reason why I feel like we've only scratched the surface here today. So, for everyone listening, whether you've always loved barns or have only come to realize that you love barns in this past half hour, I strongly recommend you visit otbfarmsolutions.ca to pick up your very own copy of Swing Beam Barns of Niagara. The barns, the photos, and the stories are really all wonderful and you won't regret it. We look forward to both the follow-up book and too many conversations about the Eckardt barn, and the Wiley barn, and the Henry of Pelham barn in the coming future. I think we're going to have to have you back here to talk about all those things as well. Thank you so much.
[0:34:33] HF: Okay, you're welcome.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:34:40] ANNOUNCER: Thanks for listening. Subscribe today so you won’t miss our next episode. To learn more, or to share your thoughts, and show ideas, visit us at thebrownhomestead.ca on social media, or if you still like to do things the old-fashioned way, you can even email us at opendoor@thebrownhomestead.ca.
[END]