Travels of a Barn Hunter

I’m Charlotte Hitchcock writing today's post. I began working for the Historic Barns project as a volunteer barn-hunter in 2007. I “adopted” several towns and went out looking for the barns. It was a great way to learn more about the back roads of the state I’ve lived in for 35 years.

Many of my favorite barns are on the working farms.

Some of them are beautifully maintained – an impressive accomplishment considering their size! This New England dairy barn at Hayland Farm in Orange was built in 1910 with fire-proof brick and stone to replace an earlier barn that had burned. The farm delivered milk to New Haven and brought back garbage to feed the pigs.

Other barns show the wear and tear of their long history, with repairs and adaptations that are made with materials at hand. Here’s a bank barn in Coventry – the open fields run down to the banks of the Willimantic River.

Photographs:
Orange, Charlotte Hitchcock; Coventry, Julie Rosen