28 Aug 2015 Old guardians
Story and photos
by Linda Henderson
My roots run very deep in the rural 501. My family has made rural Central Arkansas our home for seven generations. Although our family is no longer involved in full time farming, we still remain close to our farming roots with gardens, livestock and fruit growing.
Because of my close ties to the agricultural lifestyle, I find old barns and farm equipment a worthy photography subject.
While traveling rural Arkansas, we have found barns of all shapes, sizes and states of disrepair. The walls always seem to be decorated with dust and cobwebs. Old farm implements remain forsaken and left to return to rust. Sometimes there are remains of old red paint flecking from the walls. Wind, rain and time have left their marks on weathered gray barn doors. Latches are sometimes sprung and doors sometimes are missing their kick plates.
To survive the effects of weather, old barns had to be well built. Many are built of virgin timber. The roof of a barn is among the most important elements. Tin and metal are the primary roofing materials. The styles of roofs are varied — some are gabled in the Dutch or Prairie barn style. The prairie barn is also known as a western barn and is the American iconic image of a barn. Most of these ancient wooden structures were built to provide storage for hay, protection for animals, a farmer’s work place and a cover for a tractor.
The most common style in the 501 is the log-pen, crib or shed styled barns. This type of barn was built for function and not for beauty. They were the simple barns to build and were constructed with materials that were available. The name of this barn comes from the one-to-six pens built inside the structure. These pens, sometimes called cribs, were multi-functional — they served as storage for hay, corn or equipment or for housing livestock.
Log-pen barns were built primarily in the 1800s and early 1900s. They were most often made from unchinked logs occasionally covered with wood boards. Logs were hewn by squaring off two sides and locked at the corners with a half-dovetail or other type of notching. The roof was frequently wood-shingled or tin gabled.
Most consisted of a single room or pen/crib. As a farmer could, they expanded their barn’s capacity by building additional pens, with a passageway or dogtrot in between. This expansion may explain the different types of materials found in many old barns. As additional storage space was needed, a low post and beam shed roof were added to the sides of the barn.
Old barns are disappearing from the rural landscape. Many old barns have fallen into disrepair. Maintaining an old wooden structure is becoming cost prohibitive. They are being replaced with metal buildings or left neglected and rotting away in hay pastures. It has become too expensive to replace them, and it costs too much to tear down.
The cost of maintaining metal is much less; metal buildings are easily built and do not require as much time and expense for construction. So many times when I ask an owner of these noble old edifices about rehabbing their response is that they would love to be able to save them, but the single greatest factor is the cost. They can’t afford to hire people to do the needed repairs. So, little by little, as farmers retire or give up working the land, these barns return to dust.
If you would like to help preserve the images of old barns, here are a few photography tips.
If you have to hop a fence, ask permission to venture onto others’ land. Wear old clothes and boots. You may have to kneel down or wade through mud and other things. Protect your camera; keep the lens cap on until you are ready to click the picture. A barn can be a dusty place to visit. Look around for unexpected critters, spiders and things that slither.
Look for things of interest in the barn or around the barn. Are there livestock, tractors, farm implements and/or old tools that could be included in the picture? Things like these will give the barn interest and perspective of what a barn was used for.
Walk all around the barn; find the right angle for your composition. The other side might be the very best view. Check out the background. You may have found the most beautiful barn in the area, but if there are piles of trash in the setting, your picture could be ruined. Always look around the frame in the view finder or the back of the camera display before snapping that picture.
Lighting is the most important aspect of photography. Bright sunny days are not the best for photographing barns. The bright sun light creates high contrast between highlight and dark shadow areas. Choose overcast days when the light is soft and even. Early morning light and late evening light create very pleasing photographs.
As more and more old wooden barns are replaced in the rural landscape, it becomes more important to preserve the old barns in photographic images. So get out and take a ride down a country road, take a few pictures and enjoy our old 501 barns because the old gray barns may not be there the next time.
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