Make hay while the sun shines?

Dear blog reader:

I hope this finds you doing well.  I am fine.  A bit winded you might say.  The winds have been blowing at about 25 mph the last two days. No matter, I had been shut out of road biking for nine days. There were ponies out there to track down. So in spite of the gales, I set out for a ride to Fishers and back. I figured that if I did the hard riding into the wind first, I could reward myself by riding with a 25 mph tail wind all of the way home. It was hard. I worked and worked for two hours. Finally, it was time to turn around and come home. But I was too tired; wiped out by the constant fight against the wind. I had to call Bev to come and get me. Thankfully, she was willing to come to Richmond. Yeah, that was one strong wind out of the west.

Which brings me to two of Roger's rules to bike by; if the birds look like they are doing the moon walk into the wind don't go riding, and its corollary; if you get a call from the producer of the television show "Neighborhood Trashcan Swap", don't go riding.

I promised last week that I would spend some time cataloging some of the memories released by the demolition of the big red barn on our farm. Your comments and shared memories of the barns in your lives were touching and indicated how these vestiges of rural America had such a profound impact on many of you, and if not you, your parents or grandparents.

The big barns, that were so common in rural America a generation and a half ago, were really hay repositories. In the day before balers, which compress the hay into 50 or 60 pound blocks and secures them with two lengths of twine, farmers would store hay loose in haymows. They had teams of horses that would pull a wagon through the field of dry mown hay. The farmer's using pitchforks would pile these wagons high with loose hay. After a wagon was loaded, the wagon was pulled to the barn where a large hay fork would grapple an arm full of hay and with a horse, rope, some pulleys, and a track system the hay was dumped in the mow in a loose pile.

Because of a blend of time, density, and consumption, the computation of barn dimensions evolved to a pretty standard design through the years. The distance between the barn floor and mow is 10 feet. 10 feet seems like a lot for a cow that stands 4 to 5 ft at the withers. It is in October when you let them in the barn in October before the weather turns. However, it is just enough space to hold your animals and a 3 ft manure pack, which is how deep the ****** gets from November through April. Through the generations, farmers found that it would take two times that volume of hay to feed the animals for those five or six months. Consequently, the distance from the haymow floor to the peak of the roof was often 30 feet.

Then came the hay baler, farmers were able to compact their hay four times compared to the loose hay process. Suddenly, barns that were designed to hold 10 ton of hay were having 40 tons of hay stuffed into them; 80,000 pounds. Those barns were tough. They were made out of native lumber. I never knew what naitive lumber meant while I was growing up. I did not collect any natives lumber leaves for the 6th grade biology leaf collection. I never found any native lumber seeds to go around planting like Johnny Native Lumberseed. But my father and grandfather used the phrase "naitive lumber" with such reverence. "Oh you won't break that board. It’s native." "You can't drive a nail in that. It's native." It was hard stuff. Wanting to prove them wrong, my cousin and I bent many nails only to give up and listen to dad's advice about drilling pilot holes 3/4 of the way in and driving the nail the last quarter.

In the end, native lumber is just the lumber that was sawn from trees from the area, in central Indiana often a hard wood species. They were used in construction while the wood was still wet. In order to do this and not have your barn be full of holes and cracks that would appear as the wood dried and contracted, special construction techniques were developed to use the contraction phenomenon as an advantage. That is where we got mortise and tenon joints, pegs, barn lap siding, and why haymow floors were always boards laid flat on top of the haymow floor beams loosely, which scared me to death as I would think "this board is loose. It could spring up and let me fall through." I had a self-inflicted scary childhood.

As the wood dried, all of those construction techniques would work together and create a structure that was more than up to the task of holding 10 tons of hay suspended 10 feet off of the ground. In fact, in many cases, it was strong enough to hold 40 tons if all of the pieces used in construction were without flaws.

That is the other thing about native lumber. It is the lumber that was on the farm, the big tall straight trees in the wood lot. While the blemishes were not obvious, they were there. The cleft of grain that transversed the sawn joist was unseen. But it had radiated out from the knot from a branch halfway up. The sawman had worked around it. He was trying to get the most useable wood out of that tree. The knot was excised, cut to length and used for heat. The rest was kept and used for haymow support.

And it held. It held for 20 years. All of those 10 ton harvests never even tested it, but one day there was a 40 ton harvest. That cleft was tested. It moaned and creaked but it held. 40 ton harvests came for another twenty-five years. The old native lumber held its ground. Finally the cleft started to give way. A crack, small at first, started to grow. As it weakened, the weight was shifted to neighboring joists. The pressure increased until 1969 when something had to be done.

I remember the engineering marvel of barn jacks and their ability to move this immovable barn a 32nd of an inch at a time. The entire length of its stroke wasn't more than an inch or two. So for a pain staking day and a half I remember my father and grandfather jacking up this prize of the farm, an inch at a time, shoring up the progress, reblocking the jacks, moving it up again, taking great pains to keep everything level and true. Because if you were off a quarter of an inch, "the barn would lean and eventually come down."

In that day and a half, my father and grandfather shored up four failing joists with four 4 inch I-beams. I-beams and a job well done that held that floor and barn true for another thirty-two 80 ton harvests; a pretty good day and a half's work.

Take Care

Roger