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Beautiful barns – Ontario’s ‘castles’
The Simcoe County Historical Association is preserving old barns through a photographic archives. They are looking for volunteer photographers to help with this project.
By Ellen Cohen In the 1950’s, our family lived across the road from the Reid farm on Telford Line. Old Mr. Reid used to let my sister and me ‘help’ him in that barn. We thought he was wonderful and wise. The sounds and smells inside that barn are as sharp in my mind today as they were all those years ago. The horse whinnies and the echo of hooves on the concrete floor; the cows at the other end of barn mooing, restless, perhaps asking for their dinner; and I seem to remember birds of some kind, maybe swallows? The smells inside that barn are also clear in my mind. Oats and straw, hay and manure. Musty and pungent while still clean and natural. Today, if I drive along any rural road in Severn Township I’m bound to see at least a few of these old barns including the one on Telford Line. There are one or two beauties on Grass Lake Line and a few on Highway 12 West between Orillia and Coldwater. Some barns in the area look to be in use, maybe just for storage, I’m not sure. But sadly, many other barns appear to be ready to fall over. Sometimes I think I should hold my breath and drive by very slowly lest I be the cause of that one last, fateful breath of air to knock down one of these grand old country structures. As with everything on this earth, time eventually has its way and these barns are
naturally disappearing forever. Thankfully, the Simcoe County Historical Association (SCHA) have initiated a project and found a way to preserve these wonderful pieces of our history, not by fixing them up of course, but by organizing a photographic archive that will document barn locations, age and other identifying information. The following is from files submitted by Ted Duncan, President of the Simcoe County Historical Association. The Barns Project Pictures to Remember Ontario’s ‘castles’ are everywhere you may travel along country roads around the province. They come in all sizes, shapes and designs. These barns were built within the last 200 years by the first European families
who settled here. They cleared the land for farming and used the lumber to construct homes and barns to house themselves and the animals they brought with them. The first buildings of logs are mostly gone, although a few exist and are found near back roads and in isolated parts of Ontario. Early log homes were replaced with fine brick homes. And as farmers prospered, farm families were able to build barns greater in structure and strength. Most of those, some of which still exist, were built between the 1850’s and 1950’s and most were built with the help of their nearby neighbours. In fact, raising a barn was a great social event of the times. There are many photographic records of
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