Rebuilding the Barn

Rebuilding the Barn
by Lynn Spitznagel Sutton

There were many ways to move a building back in the 1900s. You could put it on rollers and roll it. You could saw it apart at the corners and move it wall by wall. You could take it apart and use the materials to make a house of your own choosing. Or you could do what we did, and take it carefully apart, numbering the parts, and then put it back together again on a new spot just the same as it had always been.

The Spitznagel family was going to move the Barth barn down the road from where it was in the village piece by piece, beam by beam, and then put it together again like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Janet Barth wanted it out of her back yard before it fell down. And she wanted the spot left swept clean. With Tom Mastick’s help, we had taken off the roofing, taken down the siding, dropped the old beams safely, and moved it on Tom’s truck, stacking it carefully in our woods so air could get around it and it would keep dry. (see previous post). Tom was going to put it back up again, we would help, and Janet would watch. My husband made the decision early on to bow out of the project and work from home, keeping watch over our two grade school age boys. So what I mean is “I” would help, and Tom, as it turned out, would teach me the skills I would need as we went along.

First, the foundation and the basement walls went up, and the sub flooring was nailed down so we had a place to stand while we worked, (me learning how to hold a hammer so I wasn’t hammering “like a girl”, and learning how to use a skill saw without holding my ears).

Then we rolled the beams up on the sub-flooring on large pipes, pushing the beams ahead, and running the left-behind roller up to the front as we progressed. Then we faced the problem of how to raise those weighty posts and beams, and get them back exactly as they had been before so the mortice and tenon joints would fit. Tom joked about needing a “sky hook” to raise the heavy beams, and came one day with a triple block and tackle that he thought could do the job. The first time we tried it though, we barely got the beam off the ground when the old rope broke. Off to the Northport Boat Yard to get a stronger, newer, rope.

We needed something to attach the block and tackle to. Something that could hold the weight of those heavy beams. We used a movable pole, called a “Gin Pole”, sinking it into the sandy soil next to where the next post was going to be raised each time there was a post or beam ready to raise. Tom secured the block and tackle to the top of the Gin Pole. This was not going to be a speedy process!

Before this was going to happen however, Tom had to make sure the posts were the same length as several of them had rot at the bottom and had to be shortened. He also had to shave down the base of them to ft into a square he had cut into the sub-flooring so they wouldn’t move. And then he made sure each beam went in the right place…exactly as it had been in the Barth barn. I had carefully numbered each beam with screen tacks, and then made a diagram of how they were in the barn before we took it down, so we wouldn’t get this wrong. Every mortice and tenon joint had been hand made to fit in just one particular mortice, every wooden pin kept them tight.

When Tom was ready to raise a post or a beam up, he would holler to me from where I was washing beams below to come help, and the two of us pulled the rope on the block and tackle with all our might, slowly and carefully raising the beam into place. Then I would hold the rope steady, while Tom nailed diagonal supports to the flooring to hold the post up until he fitted the cross beams in place, and pounded in the wooden pin that would hold them together forever. One of them came crashing down as we were raising it, sending us scrambling to get out of the way, but it didn’t split, and we escaped with our lives. It was a tremendous relief each time we successfully raised a beam without incident!

While Tom was getting more and more comfortable with the necessary heights, I was not. He jokingly called it his “Flying Wallendas” act when he climbed up to fit the cross beams on the posts, and later even higher to fit the rafters in place. The Flying Wallendas were a seventh-generation family of wire walkers who worked without a safety net. They experienced several falls over the years, including one in Detroit in 1962 during which they were in a pyramid formation on a high wire when it collapsed, sending two members to their deaths, while three others survived by hanging on to the wire. Those who survived returned to the wire the following night! This is the kind of bravery and confidence that Tom Mastick had!

The following spring of 1981, the third year we worked to move the Barth barn, Tom and I were finally ready to nail up up the original barn siding which had been stacked up in the woods with spaces for air around them under tarps for the last 2 years.

Again I was Tom’s ‘go-fer’, measuring the siding, cutting and handing it up piece by piece to Tom who stayed on the ladder, nailing it in place. He did that in a “reverse board and batten” pattern so the boards could dry out after it rained from both sides, rather than being nailed next to the underneath layer. (Later we found bats loved to hang out in there and had to make corrections). I came across one board with the initials R B that Janet’s father Robert Barth had carved in the siding one day long ago, and saved it for the front corner. He had branded it as his own and it stayed that way.

I really wanted to finish the roof shingles before we quit for winter and November was coming. I knew it would go faster if I helped but heights were never my thing, so with some persuading by Tom (“You wouldn’t ask us to do anything you wouldn’t do, would you?”) I climbed up the ladder, without looking down, and hammered away right along with Tom right up to the peak of the three floor building. The snow was starting to fall. We swept the snow off the roof as we went, cut holes in the fingers of our gloves so we could hold the nails, and took warm up breaks when our fingers got numb, banging those nails in the wood shingles, knowing this was the last work until spring.

The following spring there was interesting finishing work to be done. First of all, I wanted to lay the stone so I wouldn’t have to look at the cement of the first floor walls anymore. Where would we get the stone? Tom offered to haul any we collected from the stones tossed to the side of the fields near his house as the farmers once did as they plowed their fields long ago. I needed helpers picking up all the stones I’d need. Everyone helped: family, visitors, and friends alike. I hired my two little boys and their friends to find buckets of “fist sized rocks” for me, paying “a nickel a bucket “ for each they gathered. They were hard workers for 7 and 9 year olds and they were happy as they raked in the cash. It was hot sweaty work, but doing it together and making ice cream money made it more fun.

We were lucky to have gotten some stained glass windows from a local farmer who had several stored gathering dust in his barn. After the Northport Methodist Church merged with Trinity Church in 1968, the Methodists moved many of their stained glass windows to Trinity before the building was taken down, leaving space for the new school. There were some windows that were leftover however. This good man, not wanting the remaining windows trashed, had saved them in his barn, but now needed the space. He practically gave them to us, bless his heart. They were tall and slim… and broken. Judy Mastick, Tom’s wife, was an artist who worked in stained glass. She was able to take the two broken windows and using the good glass from each, repair them so we had one beautiful window, which Tom carefully secured in place in the peak of the tall ceiling.

The front porch, (the manure pit on the barn once,) was rebuilt and did indeed make a fine front porch just as Tom had said it would. Tom then moved on to another barn reconstruction project, and it was up to me to finish it off. My sons, who had been following the project with interest, moved in to help. Mark was just 10 years old, but insisted he wanted to help put the wood shingles on the porch roof, and did, amazing me with his lack of fear of heights and sklll at hammering.

Just about the time we were wondering what to do about a kitchen, we got another treasure from our neighbor, Bob Bauer, nephew of the Bauer and Schram fishing partners, who once fished Omena Bay. They shipped their fish on ice in wooden boxes down to Chicago regularly, making their own boxes from the ample supply of timber in Omena by cutting the wood up in the sawmill they had built on their property next to their little house. The sawmill was tumbling down and one day when Mr Bauer came up to sit and watch us work for a while, he told us about the piles of wood he had made tearing down the sawmill and said we could come down and help ourselves to anything we needed before he burned it. We were running out of siding at that time, so I gratefully went down to see what was there with my wheelbarrow, not expecting much. To my surprise, besides the siding we needed, I found a whole pile of old butcher block wood. I later found out, that they had gotten it from the ruins of the bowling alley floor after Omena Inn 1 burned, and had used for their flooring in their sawmill. I wanted it! Tom hauled it up to our building site in his truck.

I gave Andy Thomas the bowling alley wood and asked him to plane it and see if it would make a good counter top. Andy and Gloria were just starting up their Milling business in Northport. Andy got back to me with bad news. The old bowling alley wouldn’t make good counter tops because there was dirt ground into the cracks of the butcher block….but the good news was he could pull it apart, plane it, and make me kitchen cupboards out of it. So he did!

Life went on, my first husband died, and eventually I remarried to someone who grew up on a farm and loved my barn house. Ron Sutton planned a newer bigger kitchen for me, and our builders, Randy Gilmore’s crew, Coby Wilson and Ray, took the old butcher block boards apart, sanded them, and used the wood again (the 4th reincarnation) in my new cupboards. It was beautiful!

And that’s not all. There were 9 pitchforks in the barn, some with broken tines but most intact. Ron created a railing for our front porch out of them. The clever man also figured out how the old granary addition Randy Gillmore had put on the north side of the barn house (creating a mother-in-law room when it was needed) could be excavated and a couple more guest rooms and a bath added underneath. It meant more stone work for me, but made a wonderful needed addition

We never hung a swing from the loft like Janet had in the barn as a little girl, but we did have Janet over for dinner that first summer in our barn cottage. She looked around in disbelief, not saying a word. Then sat down to dinner. Thank you Janet!