HANCOCK COUNTY — Scottish historical novelist Sir Walter Scott had an interesting view on barns: “If a farmer fills his barn with grain, he gets mice. If he leaves it empty, he gets actors.”
An annual workshop offering practical solutions for maintaining, rehabbing and adapting historical barns to the new world comes to Hancock County next week, and though it probably won’t help with the mice, it might stave off the actors.
“Barn Again! in Indiana” rotates through Hancock County on Sept. 19 to help farmers understand how they can preserve a piece of Indiana history.
“Hancock County will be an excellent host because it has such a great agricultural heritage with so many excellent historic barns,” said Raina Regan, community preservation specialist for Indiana Landmarks, a nonprofit that advocates for the state’s historic and architecturally significant properties.
“Agriculture has been a major part of Indiana’s heritage from the very beginning,” Regan said. “Barns continue to be lost over the years, and this is an effort to preserve a major part of our heritage.”
Estimates from the Indiana Barn Foundation, a new nonprofit that hopes to be a financial funding source for barn rehabilitation, are that over 10,000 historic Hoosier barns have been lost to time in the past decade.
“And these barns are irreplaceable,” said Carolyn Rahe, founder and president of the foundation, which will play host to its own self-guided historic barn tour through Marshall County on Sept. 27.
Fourth-generation farmer Gary Kingen’s family has been working on the western Hancock County farmland that is home to the Frank Littleton Round Barn, which has become a widely known attraction and won a Central Indiana Preservation Award from Indiana Landmarks in June.
Built in 1903, the 103-foot-diameter, 103-foot-high structure could not be duplicated if disaster struck, Kingen has said, and he’s delighted the barn is on this year’s tour list.
“I think a whole busload is supposed to come out,” he said. “You have to see the barn.”
Kingen’s barn and several others will be the subject of an afternoon tour after the education sessions that will include stops at an unusual transverse frame basement barn and the Depression-era L. Martin dairy barn.
“Whether they are round barns or otherwise, they all have amazing craftsmanship, and each is magnificent in their own right,” Rahe said.
The morning educational workshop will feature Rick Collins, owner of Trillium Dell Timberworks, a timber frame building company from Knoxville, Illinois.
Collins is a master craftsman who has studied the methods and tooling used by Europeans who settled the Midwest, according to the firm’s website.
Regan said participants are signing up from throughout Indiana with some registrants calling in from out of state.
Most are probably coming to find out how to preserve a piece of Indiana history on their property while others might have something a bit more practical in mind, such as keeping the old structure in use a few more years.
In the end, the last thing anyone needs in the barn this fall is a troupe of itinerate actors hunkering down for the winter.