Barn

• 1. Introduction

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  The barn carries its purpose in its name. The English word comes from two Old English roots: bere, meaning barley or grain in general, and aern, meaning a storage place. Put together, a barn was simply a storehouse for barley. That single word, spelled bere-ern, bern, or bearn, appears at least sixty times in Old English homilies and prose. A barn is an agricultural building, usually found on farms, used for many purposes. But the same four-letter word means very different things depending on where you stand. In North America it houses cattle, horses, equipment, fodder, and grain. In the British Isles and Europe the term shrinks to storage of unthreshed cereals and fodder, while cows and horses get buildings of their own. How did one humble grain store branch into so many forms? Why are so many of them red? And how did a farm building lend its name to a unit of subatomic area? The answers run from medieval Western Europe to the laboratories of nuclear weapons research.

• 2. A European Inheritance

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  The three-aisled medieval barn is the ancestor of nearly everything that followed. Known as the tithe barn or monastic barn, it grew out of a 12th-century building tradition that also shaped halls and ecclesiastical buildings. By the 15th century, several thousand of these enormous barns stood across Western Europe. Large entrance doors and a passage corridor let loaded wagons drive straight through the aisled barn. The storage floors between the central posts or in the aisles were called bays or mows, the latter word coming from the Middle French moye. Three main forms emerged from this design. There were large barns with sideway passages, compact barns with a central entrance, and smaller barns with a transverse passage. That last, smaller type spread east, reaching Eastern Europe. Where builders used stone walls, the aisled timber frame often gave way to single-naved buildings. Not every barn descended from this medieval line. Some traced back to the prehistoric longhouse or other traditions entirely. One such case was the Low German hall house, which stored the harvest in its attic. From that house, transformed by first-generation colonists from the Netherlands and Germany, the New World colonial barn often took shape.

• 3. Building The Frame

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  In the Yorkshire Dales of England, barns called cowhouses were built from double stone walls, with truffs or throughstones acting as wall ties. Across the Atlantic, older American barns were raised from timbers hewn from trees on the farm, built as a log crib barn or a timber frame, though stone served where it was the cheaper material. The mid to late 19th century in the United States brought a quiet revolution in framing. Builders shifted away from traditional timber framing toward truss-framed or plank-framed buildings. These used dimensional lumber for rafters, joists, and sometimes trusses, cutting down the number of heavy timbers. Joints that had once been mortised and tenoned were now bolted or nailed. The inventor and patentee of the Jennings Barn claimed his design used less lumber, less work, less time, and less cost, while staying durable and offering more room for hay. Several forces pushed barns toward larger, more open interiors. Mechanization, better transportation, and a hay fork mounted on a track all played a part. Steam-powered sawmills produced smaller pieces of lumber affordably, and machine-cut nails undercut the price of hand-made wrought nails. Concrete block entered the barn-building vocabulary in the early 20th century. Steel followed, and modern barns are more typically steel buildings.

• 4. Red And Its Reasons

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  Many barns across the northern United States wear the same coat: barn red with white trim. There are two leading explanations, and both point to a single chemical. Ferric oxide, used to make red paint, was the cheapest and most readily available chemical for farmers in New England and nearby areas. The same compound may also have served as a preservative, so a red coat would help protect the structure itself. The custom traveled and took root in Scandinavia. In Sweden especially, Falu red with white trims remains the traditional colouring of most wooden buildings. Between about 1900 and 1940, many large dairy barns rose across the northern United States. Their gambrel or hip roofs maximized the hay loft above, and that silhouette became fixed in the popular image of a dairy farm. Out in the wheatbelt, barns held large numbers of pulling horses such as Clydesdales or Percherons. These big wooden buildings, filled with hay, could erupt into spectacular fires that usually meant total losses. The baler changed that calculus, letting farmers store hay and straw outdoors in stacks ringed by a plowed fireguard.

• 5. Inside The Working Space

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  The mow, which rhymes with cow, sat at the top of older North American barns, holding hay and sometimes grain. A large door at the end of the barn opened to let hay enter the loft. A system of pulleys and a trolley running along a track at the top ridge hoisted the hay up. Trap doors in the floor dropped feed down into the mangers for the animals below. A working barn is a collection of specialized rooms. The tack room held bridles and saddles and often doubled as a breakroom. The feed room stored animal feed, though modern barns tend to pile feed bales in a stackyard instead. A drive bay ran wide enough for animals or machinery. A silo held fermented grain or hay, called ensilage or haylage. Dairy barns added a milkhouse, where milk was collected and stored before shipment, and a grain bin in the mow with a chute to the ground floor for easier feeding. Modern barns often include an indoor corral with a squeeze chute for treating sick animals. Regional details were sharper still. In North Yorkshire, a cowhouse had a muck hole, called a muck'ole in the local dialect, to push manure outside without the cowhand leaving the building. The same cowhouse might have a forking hole high on the wall, so fodder could be forked up into the baux, or hayloft. Some English barns carried a gin gang, a semi-circular extension built to house a horse engine.

• 6. Many Names, Many Forms

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  Barns are classified by function, structure, location, or other features, and one building can sit in several categories at once. The bank barn was built into a banking, so a wagon could reach the upper floor, sometimes by a bridge or ramp. The bastle house was a defensive structure against raiders, with livestock accommodation on the lower floor. The Pennsylvania barn, also called a forebay or porch barn, came in standard and sweitzer types. The cantilever barn was a log crib barn with cantilevered upper floors that developed in Appalachia. The combination barn, the standard type in America and common across England, served both crop storage and animal housing. Crib barns were horizontal log structures with up to four cribs, found mainly in the southern United States. Drying barns in Finland and Sweden carried their own names, riihi and ria. The tithe barn stored the tithe, a tenth of the farm's produce owed to the church. The threshing barn was built with a threshing floor and large double doors in the centre of one side, where grain was beaten from the crop by flails and then winnowed between the doors. Its design stayed largely unchanged between the 12th and 19th centuries. Beyond barns proper sat their relatives: the shippon that housed oxen and cattle, the oast house for drying hops, the linhay with its open posted front, and the Dutch barn of the United Kingdom, an open-sided structure for hay. Some barns even had owl holes, inviting barn owls in to aid vermin control.

• 7. From Slogans To Subatomic Space

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  In the middle of the twentieth century, the broad roofs of American barns became billboards. The most common of these slogans advertised Rock City, painted across some 900 barns. Long before that, barns gathered people together for communal events such as barn dances. In New England, barns were often attached directly to the main farmhouse, an arrangement called connected farm architecture, so chores could be done sheltered from the weather. The barn even reached into physics. The term barn names a subatomic unit of area equal to 10 to the minus 28 square metres. It came from experiments with uranium nuclei during World War II. The nuclei were described colloquially as big as a barn, and the measurement was officially adopted to keep security around nuclear weapons research. The word also seeded a crop of idioms. Someone with poor aim couldn't hit the broad side of a barn. To lock the barn door after the horse has bolted means solving a problem too late. To barnstorm is to travel quickly around a large area making frequent public appearances, a phrase tied to a form of stunt flying popular in the early 20th century, often hosted near a local barn.

• 8. The Oldest Building Standing

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  On most farms, the barn is the oldest and biggest building you will find. Old farm buildings shape the landscape and record how farming and settlement unfolded over the ages. Most were raised from materials that reflected the local geology, with methods including earth walling and thatching. From the later 18th century, stone and brick roofed with tile or slate increasingly replaced clay, timber, and thatch. Metal roofs appeared from the 1850s, and canals and railways carried building materials over greater distances than before. The stable is typically the second-oldest building on the farm, well built and placed near the house because of the value of horses as draught animals. After the 1880s, many barns were converted into cow houses and fodder processing buildings. Yet survival has been uneven. Few interiors of 19th-century cow houses remain unaltered, undone by dairy-hygiene regulations in many countries, and complete granary interiors with plastered walls and wooden grain-bin partitioning are now very rare. These buildings age badly without care. Timber-framed constructions rot from damp, masonry cracks from ground movement, and walls of cob, earth mortar, or rubble cores are highly vulnerable to water. Sealing breathable walls with cement or damp-proofing can trap moisture inside them. In England and Wales, some of these structures have been granted listed building status, giving them a degree of archaeological protection, and grant schemes such as Natural England's Environmental Stewardship exist to restore historic farmland buildings.