Field guide to New England barns and farm buildings by Thomas Durant Visser

By Thomas Durant Visser

The necessary New England barn -- photogenic, filled with personality, and framed via flaming autumn foliage -- is an endangered species. of a few 30,000 barns in Vermont by myself, approximately 1000 a yr are misplaced to fireplace, cave in, or bulldozers. Thomas Durant Visser's box advisor to the barns, silos, sugar homes, granaries, tobacco barns, and potato homes of recent England is an try and rfile not only their constitution yet their traditions and techniques ahead of the surviving architectural facts of this wealthy rural historical past is misplaced forever.A well-known authority on historical barn renovation, Visser has combed the six-state sector for consultant barns and outbuildings, and two hundred of his images are reproduced the following. The textual content, including bills from 18th- and 19th-century observers, describes key architectural features, old makes use of, and geographic distribution in addition to particular positive factors like timbers and frames, sheathings, doorways, and cupolas. From English barns to financial institution barns, from ice homes to outhouses, those irreplaceable resources, Visser writes, "linger as weak survivors of the earlier. but prior to those structures vanish, every one has a narrative to tell." tourists, citizens, and students alike will locate Visser's textual content worthy in uncovering, knowing, and appreciating the tales inherent in those dwindling cultural artifacts.

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Extra resources for Field guide to New England barns and farm buildings

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Farmhands and family members often helped with site work, raising the frame, laying floors, and boarding and shingling the building. 1 The role and influence of skilled master builders, timber framers, and carpenters in the design of vernacular architecture is often ignored. The occupations typically required a period of training through a lengthy apprenticeship. 2 By comparing the architectural features of farm buildings in old England and New England, we can see that early colonial farmers and their barn builders generally followed the traditional English building designs that were common to their original home regions, with innovations made for the harsher climate and availability of construction materials.

In western New England, most builders of English barns traditionally supported the roofs with numerous pairs of small, closely spaced rafters. Roof boards were laid horizontally. Another regional variation of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century barn frames is in the location of the tie beams. Rather than placing the tie beams over the plates as described above (see fig. 1-8), western New England barn builders typically mortised the tie beams into the posts as much as two feet below the plates.

Page x Major primary sources of published historical information about farming and farm buildings in New England include such agricultural newspapers as New England Farmer, Maine Farmer, and American Agriculturalist. These and other weekly and monthly periodicals provided agricultural news, practical information, and entertainment to nineteenth-century farm families. Their correspondence columns offer rich glimpses into the motivations and concerns of generations of New Englanders. For those readers who may enjoy exploring old or abandoned barns, perhaps a few precautions are in order.

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