Beautiful York/Adams barns including: ‘An old bank barn with so much character’
Curtis Musselman, head of the barn preservation project, photographs the Starr Pottery Barn near Abbottstown, Pa. Thomas and Dianne Starr live and work in the 1850s stone-and-brick barn, which is an example of one way a barn can be preserved. Those seeking a community of barn enthusiasts and preservationists should read below.
Debbie Lynch has been told that her 150-year-old barn is the oldest and largest in the Felton area.
She is casting around for help in keeping it up:
“It’s a very large beautiful barn that’s in desperate need of repair. We put all of our money, a few years ago, into a new roof….but we need to do the foundation before it falls down. We’ve had many contractors just happen to stop by wanting the old wood, it has cedar beams. The barn is approximately 60 foot tall, 60 foot long and 30 foot wide. An old bank barn with so much character.”
She noticed the York Sunday News ran a barn restoration story and was seeking contact information. Here’s information for her and others to at least get into contact with those who care about such historic structures:
The group
Historic Gettysburg Adams County’s barn preservation project is an all-volunteer effort to catalog, preserve and draw attention to historic Pennsylvania-style barns in the region.
The group formed a few years ago as an outgrowth of a project to mark all the field hospitals on the Gettysburg battlefields. Many of the field hospitals were in barns.
In 2004, the group brought in a barn expert to teach them about the architectural significance of the Pennsylvania barn and talk about how to catalog and preserve them.
In 2005, the Pennsylvania Historic and Museum Commission awarded the group a $1,000 grant to purchase equipment and build a database for the project.
Last year, volunteers began visiting barns and logging data about them to build a registry of at least some of the more than 900 barns listed on the Adams County tax records.
To get on the registry
If you own a barn in Adams counties and would like to be added to the registry, call 642-5767 and leave your name and contact information.
A team of volunteers from the barn preservation committee will visit your Adams County barn to photograph it and document features, location, materials and other data. Once a report is completed, the group will mail you a copy, along with a 4-by-4-inch plaque for display on your barn.
On the Web
·The National Barn Alliance, http://www.barnalliance.org
· Old House Web, http://www.oldhouseweb.com/stories/Features/Historic_Barns
· The Barn Journal, http://www.thebarnjournal.org
