"One of the striking features of the New York State landscape is the great variety of barns found in the countryside. They dominate valleys or windswept flats the way churches dominate a village." These are the opening sentences of The New York Barn Book, and what follows here is the better part of those chapters that provide the means for identifying an old barn and the nomenclature for describing it. The New York Barn Book is the result of Ann and Mirko Gabler’s love of old barns and their extensive knowledge of them, gained in practice from restoring the barn they now live in, and in studying barns across the state.

The Preface goes on to explain the book’s purpose: "To an uninformed outsider the story of an old farm is a closed book. But to a knowledgeable observer the whole of New York State becomes an open-air museum. It is a purpose of this book to tell about workings of an old New York farm and to show the different types of barns found in our state." The illustrations are by Mirko Gabler.

From the early 1600s, when the first farms were established in New York State, until the beginning of the twentieth century, farmers built timber barns using ancient post-and-beam framing techniques which they had brought with them from Europe. The abundance of long straight timber in the New World was a bonanza to the early barn builders, coming as they did from countries where wood was increasingly scarce. As a result, an efficient, uncluttered design evolved in New York State that relied on relatively few but straight and larger timbers.

Although the new immigrants had for the most part built barns patterned after those in their homelands, gradually they made changes in the way the barns functioned in the New World. Whereas in Holland, the barn was nearly always attached to the house, in New York State no such barns survive. A barn in England was a place to store crops, not to house animals.

The word "barn" is a combination of Old English terms, "bere" meaning "barley" and "ern" meaning "a place." Animals were usually kept in a separate building. In America the "English Barns" that survive were clearly built to shelter both crops and animals under one roof. These changes came about in the early days of the colonies for reasons about which we can only speculate.

The history of timber barns in New York State begins with the Dutch settlers who farmed in the Mohawk, Schoharie, and Hudson River valleys and on Long Island before the Revolutionary War. They had developed a barn type that had come to be known as the New World "Dutch Barn." It was nearly square, with steeply pitched roof and with wagon doors in the gable ends.

Farmers from the British Isles and New England who gradually settled throughout the state built a rectangular "English Barn" (also called a "Connecticut Barn," "Three-Bay" or "Yankee Barn"), with wagon doors in the long sides of the barns.

After the Civil War, New York farmers began keeping much larger dairy herds, and a new version of the English Barn known as a "Basement Barn" evolved. An English Barn was raised onto a stone basement, which housed the dairy herd, while the timber barn above was used for storing hay. A Basement Barn set into a hillside is a "Bank Barn." Earth and stone ramps lead to the wagon entrances on the upper level.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a craze for circular-barn building swept the state and the complex "Round Barn" or "Polygonal Barn" became popular, and many were built at great expense. The few that still stand are true marvels of timber framing.

By the end of the nineteenth century, to keep up with the competition from the western states, many small New York farms were consolidated into ever-larger operations and the barns grew accordingly. Barn building had entered the industrial age. Balloon construction became standard and prefabricated trusses were used to span these giant spaces. A new barn built in 1910 was likely to be three times the size of an original English Barn.

What follows here are descriptions of the major types of barns found in New York State. There will be, of course, regional variants that borrow from more than one of the types of barns described below.

Identifying Characteristics

• Found in the Hudson, Mohawk and Schoharie Valleys, and on Long Island.
• Steeply pitched roof, low side walls.
• Nearly square floor plan, often 40’ x 45’.
• Wagon doors in both gable ends.
• Inside, massive crossbeams span the wide center aisle.

The New World Dutch Barn is well built and spacious. Due to its oversized anchor beams, simple layout, and strong joinery, some fine examples have survived intact to the present time.

The Dutch Barn was built nearly square on a low dry stone foundation or on piers. Like its predecessor in Holland, the New World Dutch Barn was divided into three main aisles. The widest was the center aisle where the threshing and other farm activities took place. In the side aisles were the stalls, with the animals facing the threshing floor. Massive anchor beams that span the central aisle are a dramatic feature of these barns. They connect to the posts, often with large protruding tenons that are typically rounded into tongues. These anchor beams support a platform of poles where hay, flax, or straw was kept.

Dutch Barn, Columbia County. Photo: Mirko Gabler.

In the Dutch Barns the wagon doors were located in the gable ends of the barn. These doors swung on wooden or metal hinges, with one side halved to create the typical "Dutch door." Above the door was a small overhang called the pentice. A small door for animals and humans was located in the corner of the gable end. Martin holes were cut in various designs high in the gable, allowing for the passage of birds and air. Clapboards ten or twelve inches wide were used as siding. No original glazed windows have been found in any New York Dutch Barns.

Most Dutch Barns standing today were built between the late 1700s and the 1850s. This type of barn was popular, not only with the Dutch; in 1801 a contract was signed in Albany County between Alexander Murray, a farmer,
and Abraham Smith, a barn builder, for erection of a "Dutch Barn, 42’ long and 40’ wide."

Identifying Characteristics

• Found throughout New York State.
• One-story, rectangular, 30’ x 40’ or larger.
• Divided into three bays.
• Wagon doors on the long sides of the barn, leading into the center bay.

The English Barn (also known as the Yankee, Three-Bay or Connecticut Barn), provided the general pattern for most barn building in the state until the latter half of the nineteenth century. The original English Barn was transplanted to New York from New England. It was a rectangular structure built on a dry-laid stone foundation and divided into three sections or "bays."

Unlike the Dutch Barn, the English Barn is entered through its long sides, through doors opening onto a center bay. The center bay served as a threshing floor and a wagon runway. One of the bays housed cows, oxen, and horses, while the other was an enclosed granary. Hay or straw was stored on poles in the
loft above.

The basic frame of an English Barn consists of four bents (cross-sectional framing units connected together by plates or sills). The configuration of the bents varies from barn to barn, sometimes incorporating ladders leading to the loft, additional braces or timbers that mangers were attached to.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, when farms were being modernized, many original English Barns were moved with a team of oxen into a field to become a "Field Barn." Often they can be found unaltered, as they were built some 150 years ago.

Gambrel-Roofed Barn, Dutchess County. Photo: Mirko Gabler

Identifying Characteristics:

• Double pitched roof
• Wagon doors on the long side of the barn
• Built with or without a basement
• Three- or multiple-bay floor plan

The Gambrel-Roof Barn is a combination of a double-pitched roof, a style borrowed from early colonial houses, with the frame of an English Barn. The gambrel roof was popular with house builders in lower New York State in the late eighteenth century but was not widely used on barns until the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century the Gambrel Barn became popular in the western part of the state and was adapted to the balloon-frame construction, which used sawn planks instead of hewn timbers. With the aid of trussed rafters a clear span could be created allowing for the use of the laborsaving hay trolleys then coming into favor. The older, hand-hewn, timber-framed barns are found mostly in the eastern part of the state, while the larger Gambrel Barns, increasingly constructed from sawn timber, are more common in the western counties.

The Gambrel Barn, painted red with white trim, has come to epitomize the "classic American Barn." Perhaps it is the reassuring sight of the barn roof seemingly bulging with bountiful crops that has made it such a staple in popular culture.

Basement Barn, Delaware County. Photo Mirko Gabler

Identifying characteristics:

• Two or three levels, with ramps leading to the hayloft.
• Basement usually built of stone.
• Stanchions for cows in the basement.

The change from English Barns to Basement Barns came about around 1850, because of the gradual increase in dairy farming. Dairy farming quickly became more profitable as railroads allowed for easy access to city markets and regional cheese factories. To provide space for the larger dairy herd, a masonry basement was built, and one or two English Barns were moved onto it. An important feature of a Basement Barn is the cupola on the roof connected to an airshaft that ventilated the basement. To store the increased volume of milk, a milk house was added to the barn where milk was kept cool in cans standing in a water-filled trough.

The configuration of the bents in a Basement Barn are nearly the same as those in an English Barn, though by the end of the century timbers connecting the queen posts are omitted to make room for the horse-powered hay fork. The basement has doors in each gable end and a central aisle with stanchions on either side. The manure is collected along the central aisle, which often features a trolley or other mechanical aid for moving the manure out of the barn. The upper level or loft was used for hay storage.

In locations where the terrain was hilly, the basement was built into the hillside, creating a Bank Barn. The locations of doors and ramps to the upper levels were determined by terrain. Some barns are two or three stories high with stone and earthen ramps leading to each level. This way the hay can be unloaded at the top of the barn, and to reach the animals it travels down through chutes to the lower level.

Identifying Characteristics:

• Two or three levels, with ramps to upper levels.
• Built round or with eight, ten, thirteen or any number of sides.

Most Round and Polygonal Barns date from the second half of the nineteenth century, although octagonal and hexagonal structures have been built in America since the late eighteenth century. Shakers built one of the earliest round stone barns in 1826 in Hancock, Massachusetts. Soon timber variants of the Shaker barn appeared everywhere along the Western frontier as the new "scientific agriculture" caught on in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Round and Polygonal Barns functioned like the traditional Basement Barn but with unusual, laborsaving ways of handling hay. A ramp led directly into the upper story where hay was easily unloaded from the circular drive into the central silo-like hay shaft. The arrangement of stalls on the ground floor with the animals’ heads facing the hay-storage shaft meant less walking for the farmer at feeding time. It was believed that Round and Polygonal Barns allowed for the most efficient handling of hay as well as the manure. The circular-barn builders were likely to be a notch or two above the ordinary barn builder, as the job required a good grounding in geometry and structural engineering. An open mind and willingness to experiment was probably also an asset. When siding the round barns, the wood clapboards had to be wetted and curved on a form before they could be nailed to the barn frame. Beautifully laid masonry in the basement level is also common.

Page Two >>>