A Real Book Barn

When I first announced my photo project about Pennsylvania barns, one of my former journalism students quipped: Does Pottery Barn count?

He was playing off the commercialization of the word "barn," not the literal barn. There are variations of Pottery Barn and not one of the businesses is in a barn. I saw a Dress Barn in a shopping mall in Southbury, Connecticut, the other day.

However, there's an exception.

That would be Canaday's Book Barn in Carlisle, which I photographed right after the Lebanon Valley barn tour and the McPherson barn in Gettysburg.

If you go to the link, you'll learn that the owner, Ted Canaday, converted the barn into a bookstore. He has done an excellent job of retaining the barn's internal features, from the plan floor to the post and beams. He did add a loft and reused lumber from the granary to create restrooms. He did have to meet building codes.

He gave me a tour and I snapped several photos but I do want to go back when I have more time and using my wide-angle lens and a tripod, take more photos so you can see the internal barn structure as Ted has restored it.

A Pennsylvania Barn Story

I have finally begun in earnest photographing barns for my Pennsylvania Barn Stories. My wife and I recently went on a barn tour in the Lebanon Valley and then proceeded to Gettysburg to meet with friends and to photograph the McPherson barn.  Here's what the National Park Service says about the barn:

Edward McPherson's farm was a half mile west of Gettysburg, atop the ridge that also bears his name. The area was the scene of intense fighting on July 1st, 1863, as Confederate General Henry Heth's Division advanced towards Gettysburg against defending Union cavalry under General John Buford. Union reinforcements from General John Reynolds' First Corps arrived and counterattacked, and fighting swirled through McPherson's pasturelands and two fields planted in corn and wheat, as well as through neighbor John Herbst's woods. McPherson's barn became a place of refuge for the wounded, and continued as a hospital long after the battle ended.

McPherson was a lawyer and journalist who had served in the U.S. House of Respresentatives from 1859 until March of 1863. A Radical Republican, he had lost the1862 election, after which President Lincoln appointed him as Deputy Commissioner of Internal Revenue. John Slentz and his family were renting the McPherson farm at the time of the battle.

The barn is the last survivor of Edward McPherson's buildings, and was restored by the National Park Service in 1978. It is currently used by a local farmer who also leases the McPherson fields.

We stayed at a motel on Buford Avenue in a small unit separate from the  other rooms. The modest building was identified as the Dustman Barn and was also used as a hospital during the Battle of Gettysburg.

We then moved on to Carlisle to check out Canaday's Book Barn. The owner graciously opened the doors and turned on the lights and I took some photos but I want to go back and take more.

I've identified more than 60 barns that might be story worthy. Now I need to find the time to photograph them.

Let the Fundraising Begin

As I reported earlier, I did not get Guggenheim funding for my photo project Pennsylvania Barn Stories. (Scroll down a couple of screens to see that entry.)

So now I’m trying something called Kickstarter, which coincidentally was the subject of a story in the New York Times about the same time I received Kickstarter approval for my project.

I want to raise $5,000, which will cover gas and mileage and motel rooms as I traipse about Pennsylvania photographing barns. I’ve identified about 40 barns so far and expect to learn about more when I attend the annual meeting of the Historic Barn and Farm Foundation of Pennsylvania in June.

As that group does every year, there will be a barn tour, this time in Lebanon County. Likewise, historical societies in various Pennsylvania counties also schedule barn tours and so I’ll have more barns lined up by summer’s end.

As of today, I’ve raised 10 percent of my goal. If I don’t raise $5,000, I receive nothing. If you’d like to contribute, click here.

You Have Been Compromised

I was shuffling through the pile of that day’s mail while carrying items into the house after a day trip. I noticed a letter from my credit union and realized it was not a pitch to get a loan or a toaster. (Do banks still give toasters?) So instead of making a second trip to the garage to bring in more items, I ripped open the envelope and was not disappointed. My debit card had been compromised. The fault lies with the merchant/payment processor, which I take to mean the company that data gets sent to when I swipe my card. The credit union said I would get a new card within 10 to 14 days and could continue to use the compromised one in the meantime. Or I could call an 800 number and cancel my current card and do without. I opted to do without. What annoys me in all of this is that Visa would not identify the merchant/payment processor. I’d like to know who screwed up, but in the end Visa is no doubt taking better care of the processor than it is taking care of me. Time to occupy Visa. I should be thankful, I suppose. At least my checking account wasn’t overdrawn.

Pennsylvania Barn Stories

(This is a proposal I submitted for a Guggenheim grant in the fall. I didn't get the grant, but I still intend to do the project.)

I spent a lot of time driving the Interstate 81 and 80 corridors in Pennsylvania this summer and began to pay attention to barns. I saw old barns and new barns, deteriorating barns and barns that had been converted to other uses. I began to wonder about their stories and thus was born this proposal.

I want to not only photograph barns that have unique stories behind them but also to include their stories in a coffee table book titled Pennsylvania Barn Stories. The Penn State Press is interested, according to Kathryn Yahner (kby3@psu.edu), assistant editor, whose areas are Pennsylvania history and regional studies. When I outlined this proposal to her, she replied: “I would be happy to look at a final manuscript—this sounds like an interesting project, and one with a good potential fit with our list. Do keep me apprised of your progress. At the point where you have some sample material to share, I'd be very interested in discussing the project in more detail.”

First, I have to find the barns, and I have mapped out a plan to do that. I have as one resource The Pennsylvania Barn: Its Origin, Evolution, and Distribution in North America (Creating the North American Landscape) by Robert (Bob) Ensminger, a professor emeritus of geography. This is the only book devoted to Pennsylvania barns and the barns are specific to a certain style whereas I will consider all barns. It is an academic study, not a popular book, but it does contain some information about barns that might have stories. I’ve also found books and Websites about barns in a certain county or in a certain area and I will use those as needed. (According to the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, Pennsylvania has 63,000 farms. Agriculture is the leading industry in Pennsylvania.)

The Historic Barn & Farm Foundation of Pennsylvania has volunteered to publish in its newsletter an item about the project. I will also send news releases to news media outlets throughout the state and ask their help in publicizing the project and even identifying barns with stories. In the meantime, I’ve opened a page on Facebook devoted to collecting Pennsylvania Barn Stories. (The first half-day generated one contact and others followed.)

I don’t want to prejudge what barn stories are worth telling, but the possibilities include architecturally and historically significant barns, barns that have been in families for generations, new barns built in a different style (I have identified one already), barns that have been converted into houses (I know of four conversions and one in progress) or other uses (I know of two). An Amish barn raising should also be on the list.

Once I have a list of willing participants, I will map out photographing the barns and collecting the stories. I expect each barn will require at least two days of on-site work in order that I may photograph in the morning and evening light as well as taking interior shots during the day. I plan on using the high dynamic range process, especially for the interior shots. High dynamic range is a process that results in sharply detailed photographs. (See interior photograph of St David’s Cathedral in Wales above.)

I also want to take photographs to cover the range of seasons so I anticipate that I would return to some barns to photograph them in different seasons. Between identifying barns, photographing the barns and collecting the stories, and returning for seasonal photographs, three years is a reasonable timeline.

The 1940 Census

As you probably know by now, the 1940 census is online, even downloadable although not searchable. You cannot search by names, which is the way most of us would want to search, but when you first look for a community, assuming it was of any size, you can limit your search to a street.

The first thing I did was try to find my maternal grandparents. That took longer than expected because I thought they lived in one township when it was really another (both starting with R, by the way, which should explain my confusion). When I did find them, two things surprised me. My uncle was living with them and my grandfather, a native of Wales, was listed as having been born in Pennsylvania.

What this particular page in the census didn’t tell me is who responded to the census-taker’s questions. They were supposed to be indicated with a circled x. So I’m speculating that my grandmother was the respondent and that she didn’t know how to spell the name of the Welsh town where my grandfather was born or she just decided the hell with it, what business is it of yours, and said Pennsylvania. Even though I want my ancestry lines kept clear, I can appreciate a small act of civil disobedience, especially coming from my petite grandmother.

By 1940 my uncle would have been in his 30s so living with his parents raised questions. My older sister suggested that it probably happened because his first wife had died, and my oldest cousin (who was around 12 in 1940) backed that up and said he was depressed for a long time. My older sister (then about 2) believes that my uncle’s wife died from spinal meningitis. She and my cousin said that my aunt’s casket was placed in the front window of their house for the viewing, that no one could come inside because she had died of a contagious disease. (If your uncle’s wife dies before you’re born, was she still your aunt?)

I found my paternal grandparents in a nearby town and learned that my grandfather’s sister was living with them. Next door were his daughter and her husband living with her in-laws. I saw a lot of couples living with parents/in-laws and even one couple living with an uncle and aunt. (They would become the parents of a girlfriend of mine so their name popped out.)

Also notable was finding the circled x behind the wife’s name rather than the “head’s” name. No doubt the “head” was at work when the census-taker stopped by.

And, I also found my parents, who were then living near Harrisburg with my two older sisters. Nothing dramatic there.

The 1940 census is flush with information, some of it inadvertent. You need only to start looking.

The Three Sisters

You can never tell what the cat will drag in or what a landscaper’s crew will dig up on your property. What the cat drags in goes into the garbage rather quickly, assuming you find it rather quickly. What the landscaper digs up takes more time.

We’re having a patio built at the rear of our house. It wasn’t something I had in mind to do immediately but as soon as we finished our walk-out basement, it became apparent that we needed to do something outside. So we hired a landscape company, which sent in an architect and who, with another architect, drew up plans to create a patio, fix a falling wall, finish off a fallow area at the extreme rear of our property and create a stone wall along the front where the lawn drops off to the street.

I wanted the wall across the front because I was jealous that many of the condos across the street had stone walls that added to their appearance.

Much needed to be dug out to get our patio up and running and the wall fixed and on the first day the crew asked me if they could dump the extracted dirt in the fallow area of our property. I said no because we had long-range plans to develop that. The crew assured me they had a place to dump the dirt off site.

That worked very well until one day I looked out and discovered that the crew had dug up three huge boulders (either limestone or sandstone). I quickly ran out and asked them not to remove them from the property. I knew they would fit into our landscape somewhere. In fact, the crew wanted one of them to place at the end of the new wall. Fine, I said; I can do something with two boulders.

In the end, the crew found three more boulders and I figured out what I wanted to do. I had the crew moved the best three to the front of the house and line them up. I call the result rock art and gave it the title “The Three Sisters.” I note that I had three sisters at one time and that there is a huge formation in the Blue Mountains of Australia called the Three Sisters. (There’s also one in Moab National Park called the Three Gossips, but I didn’t think that would fly.)

We’re planning to mulch around them for now and in the fall plant a number of white birch trees behind them, although we want to check with our architect first to see what she thinks of planting Mountain Laurel. Mountain Laurel is, after all, Pennsylvania’s state flower. I remember seeing a lot of Mountain Laurel and white birch trees in the woods behind our neighborhood in the town I grew up in.

Needless to say, both are evocative and I can’t wait to see which one we plant.