TALL TREASURES

BY ERIK ANDERSON Special to The News-Post

When the team of nearly three dozen volunteer docents reported for training to learn how to guide visitors through this year’s 16th annual Barnstormers Tour and Plein Air Paint Out, they were taught how to “read” the historic barns that make up the tour.

“It’s kind of like a book, and we’re teaching them how to read that book because it’s not quite written out there in letters,” said Dean Fitzgerald, a docent trainer and founding member of the event, which will be held on June 17 and benefits the Frederick County Landmarks Foundation.

Saying that reading the architecture and markings in a historic barn is like decoding the biblical stories depicted on cathedral windows, he explained. “This is even much more abstract than that because a lot of those stories in those stained-glass windows are known stories. In this case, a lot’s left to interpretation.” Fitzgerald, who owns a company that repairs historic buildings, said in some cases, documents or family stories shed light on when and how barns were constructed or used, but most of the time, that information must be inferred from carefully studying the structures themselves.

One of the newly trained docents, Kevin Oyler, who grew up on a farm and had a career in construction, said Fitzgerald taught the docents to pay attention to small details, which can reveal a lot of information. For instance, examining the way the barn’s joints overlap each other will often tell docents which side of the barn was constructed first, which in turn suggests the structure’s primary use.

“Some barns had pretty specific uses. Some of them were built really just to store hay; some of them were built for milking cows only,” Fitzgerald said. “In some barns, they milk the cows and store the hay. In other barns, they’ve got the cows, the bull, the horses and the pigs and chickens in there, and they had the hay and grain.”

In some cases, the information provided in the barns can be deceptive, so no one discovery can be taken at face value in isolation. For instance, many people think that dates carved in a beam or stone are sure indicators of when the barns were either started or finished. But it was common for materials to be salvaged from older barns, so those dates need to be verified, Fitzgerald said.

Barnstormers Tour And Plein Air Paint Out

When : Barn tour from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., art exhibition and auction from 3:30 to 5 p.m. June 17, rain or shine.

Where : The barns are located throughout the Utica and Creagerstown areas

Tickets : $20, free for children under 12.

“[Fitzgerald] talks about how to determine the age, and you do that by looking for clues like how the beams were made,” Oyler said. “Were they made by a sawmill or were they made by hand?”

Many of the human-made markings inside of barns are even less clear than dates, Fitzgerald said, and remain largely mysterious, even to trained barn readers.

“We may see tally marks like someone was keeping score written on the wall.

Available at the Frederick Visitor Center and online until midnight June 16. Day-of tickets can be purchased from 9:30 a.m. to noon June 17 at St. Paul’s Utica Church, 10621 Old Frederick Road, Thurmont. Ticket holders will be given a guidebook with a map of the barn

What was that for?” Fitzgerald mused. “I don’t mean just a group of five tally marks. There will be a group of 1,000 tally marks. It’s not like we’ve just seen that once; we’ve seen that in barns many times.”

Because those types of markings often appear in or near grain storage areas, Fitzgerald thinks they were used for counting grain, but he has trouble imagining what units they represent (buckets, barrels, wagonloads?) or locations.

Info : fredericklandmarks.org/events whether they measure grain coming in or going out.

The Gravy Soppers will perform at the art exhibition. Food will be available from In10se BBQ food truck, and the Lewistown United Methodist Church will sell sandwiches.

One of the things Fitzgerald appreciates about the Barnstormers because it allows visitors to view those types of small details, which are rarely ever seen by the public.

“If you grew up in Frederick or Walkersville in town, you had very little chance to see the inside of one of these [barns], let alone have a docent explain to you what this goofy thing