Growing up on a family farm, I spent a lot of time from alone with nature, and alone with structures.
Barns are the collective centers of farms and communities. They are places of storage, of safety, of refuge. They are the difference between a garden and a farm; between feeding a family, and supplying a nation with food.
Barns are tangible examples of the efforts of those who have gone before and are very real connections to a collective past. They are symbolic in the way they remind us of those things for which our ancestors have worked; a reminder that those in previous generations were not people of idleness. They were problem-solvers and they were pragmatists; integrity and labor were prized. Ostentation was shunned (they couldn’t afford it) but beauty was found and prized in small things.
Many factors have contributed to the challenges that smaller-scale agriculture face in our nation, but we as communities are now confronting very real questions of how we’ll deal with those things which have been handed down to us, and what we’ll hand down to others. Do we hold so sacred the rights of development that we are unwilling to come together as communities and decide what is worth keeping and remembering? Or are street signs and possibly some high-end furniture all that we leave to remind our children of what was there before?
I realize that there are no easy answers to these questions and that not every barn can or ought to be saved. But I fear that in our rush to develop the countryside we’re paving over our birthright and in the process creating a collective amnesia of the principles that our ancestors worked so hard to hand down and instill.
