Prairie Architecture: The Barn

(Written in response to Challenge Your Camera)

Every farm has one. They may be of different sizes and configurations, they might be build of different materials, but they all have the same function – a place to shelter livestock during inclement weather, a place where cows/sows/ewes/horses give birth, and a place to keep their fodder and bedding.

This is the barn I grew up with. My grandfather, Abraham Hanna, had it built in the summer of 1917, the year he moved the entire farmstead one mile, from the east side of Sec. 25 clear across to the west side, just north of the village of Meyronne, Saskatchewan. It was built under the direction of local carpenters, Norman Hisey and R. Leadley, who built to last – huge old-growth fir posts, beams, joists and rafters are the “bones” of the barn. Mr. Leadley had the misfortune of falling off the roof and, as my grandfather recorded in his diary, “was badly injured.” When the barn was finished, Mr. Hisey painted “Cloverdale Farm” on the roof.

It no longer houses livestock – the last horse died about 1949 and my father sold the last of the cattle about 1968 – but I remember it as a place filled with the aroma of manure and straw and chop and cattle. Those aromas seeped into the concrete floor and the fir beams, never to leave. Three milk cows – two Jerseys and a Guernsey – stood in the stanchions to be milked, their tails constantly switching back and forth, threatening to swat the unwary milker. The bull filled one of the box stalls both physically and psychologically (I was terrified of the monster). Two other box stalls were well-used come March and April as “birthing” rooms; I remember Dad coming in from the barn and announcing, “We’ve got a calf!” The barn cats ruled, semi-wild creatures that birthed in the mangers or the hay loft, that sallied forth to hunt mice and rats and gophers, that vanished in a trice when we walked in and peered suspiciously at us from their hidey-holes. The former horse stalls housed equipment or were boarded up to hold grain.

The loft housed the straw pile and the chop bin and flocks of pigeons and barn swallows and sparrows. The straw pile was our “mountain;” my brother and I trekked up and down it, rolled in it, threw handsful of straw at each other, and then spent an eternity picking straw and chaff out of our hair, our ears, our clothes. The chop bin – “chop” being oats chopped into a coarse, flour-like feed – was the bane of our chores. It always clogged in the chute, forcing us to hammer at it with the shovel until it dislodged and came thundering down, covering us from head to toe in an itchy cloud. We spat it out, dug it out of our ears, tousled it from our hair, slapped it off our clothes and then carted 5-gallon pails of it in our little red wagon the 100 yards or so to the chicken coop.

Hisey and Leadley built well – the barn is as straight and solid as it was 103 years ago. The neighbour who bought our farm respected the barn’s antiquity – he painted it and reshingled the roof. It now looks almost like new, although the roof no longer proclaims “Cloverdale Farm.”

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