810-Lancasttr Farming,
Artisans Strive To
Motion's Historic Boms
DEDHAM, Mass. America's
old bams are crumbling away, but
people like Richard W. Babcock
are trying to save as many of them
as possible.
Babcock, owner of a bam
museum at Hancock, Mass., has
developed powerful arms and
shoulders from 30 years of hefting
huge wooden beams in restoring,
rehabilitating, and rejuvenating
ancient bams from New England
and New York.
He’s a zealous missionary who
tells anyone who will listen, “The
original bam is a priceless anti
que.” Using fastidiously main
tained, old-fashioned tools such as
adzes and hewing axes, he has
rebuilt about 75 bams.
Objects Of Nostalgia
Babcock has considerable com
pany throughout the United States.
Old bams of all kinds are objects of
nostalgia, relics of our agrarian
past, and reminders of simpler
times.
Every section of the country has
distinctive traditional bams, many
of them decaying. New bams lend
to be look-alike metal sheds, func
tional but devoid of romance.
Most of Babcock’s restored
bams have been moved from their
original sites. Many have become
the core of expensive homes with
high, peaked ceilings and interior
frames of massive, hand-hewn oak
beams. In what Babcock views as
his crowning achievement, he
moved two 18th-century bams
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from upstate New York to subur
ban Vienna, Va., where they are
now the Bams of Wolf Trap, an
acoustically exemplary
performing-arts center.
Here in Dedham, a Boston sub
urb, Babcock, 52, and his small
crew of artisans are putting the fin
ishing touches on a pre
revolutionary bam belonging to
the Animal Rescue League of Bos
ton. Babcock calls the project “a
fusion of history with modem
methods for the treatment of
animals."
History is critical to all of Bab
cock’s projects. “I’ve become a
nut about it,” he says. He spends
hours in courthouses, diligently
tracking down details of the bams
he preserves. Sometimes he writes
brief histories of the bams.
From his assiduous research he
has learned, among other things,
that pre-revolutionary New Eng
land plantation owners had many
black slaves. He has found and
dismantled what he thinks is a
bam built by French settlers near
Hoosick, N.Y., in the mid-16th
century, long before most histo
rians have recorded their presence.
“I’m concerned that too many
people are looking at bams for pro
fit, and they’re really not much
interested in the history,” Bab
cock says. “A little of that may be
good, but maybe too much of it is
terribly bad, because we lose some
wonderful history.”
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star jfore the pre-revi jtionary Ahe has
rehabilitated at the Pine Ridge Animal Center in Dedham, Mass. He calls the
project “a fusion of history with modern methods for the treatment of ani
mals.” Babcock, who devotes his life to the preservation of old barns, con
ducts exhaustive research on their history, then uses old-fashioned tools to
rebuild them. “The original barn is a priceless antique,” he says.
Quakers’ Stone Barns
A few states away, in Pennsyl
vania, Dale Lehmer quit his job as
a social worker 10 years ago and
turned to full-time bam rehabilita
tion in Chester County, home of
many stone bams built by Quaker
farmers in the 18th and 19th
centuries.
Lehmer, now 42, specializes in
bam conversions, often to houses
or additions. “I don’t want bams
to vanish,” he says. ‘‘They have a
certain artistic quality about them.
They put people in touch with their
history.” In ages past, he says,
“The amount of work people pul
into bams—and love and commit-
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ment matches what went into
churches.”
Martha Leigh Wolf, historic
preservation specialist at the Bran
dywine Conservancy’s Environ
mental Management Center in
Chadds Ford, in Chester County,
sharply distinguishes between
restoration actually restoring a
bam to its original condition
and rehabilitation, or “adaptive,
reuse,” for another purpose, such
as a house.
Many rehabilitations bother her.
“So many bams are handsome
buildings,” she says, “but they
lose their bamness, so to speak.”
Babcock argues that a rehabili
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lalion, when don right, preserves
the integrity of the original barn.
“It’s an effective means of preser
vation, too,” he says. “It isn’t just
robbing a bam off the land. It’s
actually even doing more with it.”
Barclay and Lucy Tittmann and
their family live in a spacious
house in Concord, Mass., that Bab
cock rehabilitated from an 18th
century New York bam. “It’s very
mucha way oflife,” says Mrs.Tit
tmann. “It’s hard to imagine living
in another kind of house after
this.”
Although bam rehabilitation
may be concentrated in the North
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