Marvels of Time

I've spent several weekends and evenings in this barn.  Doing a number of things, most of them involving the transit of hay and straw into the barn during the dog days of summer and the exporting of the same hay and straw during the winter.  

Moving the bales into the barn was the most challenging, the 90-100 degree temperatures outside this barn felt pretty pleasant compared to the 110 degree temperatures and dust on the inside of this barn. 

The winter allowed for a more enjoyable process.  While the barn was filled as quickly as possible during the summer, it was emptied slowly each winter as we took bales off the loft, one wagon-full at a time.  It allowed for a lot of conversation between my family members, which often led to conversation about the barn itself.  A barn that was constructed the same year the Civil War ended and the year Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

Originally, the barn stored hay to feed horses, but not on a typical farm of the period.

Above is a 1930s aerial photo of the Bemis farm.  The farm is in the bottom left corner.  The barn, built in 1865, can be seen by the orange oval.  The dots in the fields around this barn were apple trees.  

Here a struggling family picked apples, filled a Model 'A' Ford, and drove around selling them to neighbors and friends to make a living in the Great Depression of the 1930s.  (The apple trees have since been uprooted, now these areas are fields of corn and soybeans).

As a kid, the Bemis farm was pretty fascinating.  Every barn was full of equipment from a time when horses were the main method of transportation.  The Bemis farm looked like a place that was essentially a ghost town.  A thriving farm that had all of a sudden gone silent, leaving everything where it was over 50 years ago.  As the only surviving child in the family, has not sold anything or changed anything since the farm quit operating.  In fact, you can see more of the farm buildings in the background of the photo I took this summer (also notice the vegetation growth from the 1930s to today, nearly bare in the 1930s, overgrown today). 

The inside of this barn is a marvel.  Entire tree trunks were used as supports and wooden pins (instead of nails) help keep the barn together.  What's even more fascinating than the construction, is the thought that this barn is older than any living person.  The barn is nearly 148 years old.  The things this barn has seen in 148 years are unimaginable; the sunrises, the sunsets, the raging thunderstorms, rainbows, floods, droughts, not to mention the beginning of rural Illinois society in the 1860s. 

2013 is the first time this barn has spent a summer empty since its construction.  Not because its structurally weak, but the reality is that farming methods have changed substantially since its construction.  The barn constructed to store a few cows, chickens, small equipment, and harbor hay in a loft is no longer feasible and no longer built.  In fact, as our generation grows older, we'll watch many of these small-family farms and barns wither away, fall down, or be torn down. 

I photograph these barns while I still can.  The Bemis barn, while not that as-ethically pleasing as some, has a lot of nostalgic feelings for those who have made their living here through hard work, sweat, and sacrifice.  The Bemis family and the Greuel family have been neighbors and worked together since the 1930s.

Below are some of my favorite 'marvels of time' from various places in Illinois.

Alexis, Illinois

What's left of a farm in the middle of a now, wooded area near Stewardson, Illinois

San Jose, Illinois

Colfax, Illinois

You'll notice that all of these barns, contain 'corn-cribs' or areas to store corn cobs on the inside walls.  As farmers picked their corn by hand and unloaded it through the open compartments on top of the barns using an elevator (see photo below) and stored the corn in the walls of the barn.  A practice long out-dated, but explains the rooftops of each of these barns and the hollow wooden walls.  Barns are now boxy machine sheds of great size and little aesthetic quality.

The elevator used to transport corn cobs to the top of this barn still sits where a farmer left it over 30 years ago.  Stewardson, Illinois