WESTERN OHIO, July, 2007 - I reached home long after dark on Thursday after 911 miles of blue-highway travel through some of the prettiest country and bleakest cities the East has to offer the less-than-casual observer. The U.S. Routes traverse the grittier parts of the nation that you might see from a passenger railcar (could you find one). I saw more than one abandonded farmstead (corn cultivated right up to the For Sale sign on the front steps), and no people or coffee anywhere.

It all started innocently enough...

This project took breath when I responded to a casual invitation from preservation expert Rudy Christian to look at the Chamberlin barn down in Miamiburg, Ohio, while I was out that way last year working on Carriage Hill.

The idea was to dismantle, repair, and resize the Chamberlin barn to rest upon an upgraded Hertzler barn foundation on the Hertzler homestead in nearby Springfield at the George Rogers Clark Historic Park.

The Chamberlin barn, which was scheduled for demo-lition in 2005, was situated on a 90-acre farm surrounded on three sides by new housing and bordered on the fourth by a monstrous cell tower and a miles-long shopping strip. In 2006, Lynn and Mike Miller donated the Chamberlin barn to the park. Lynn grew up on the Chamberlin farm. Receiving the barn in a poignant ceremony led by Rudy Christian were Mary Speasmaker and son Dan Speasmaker. Mary, at 90 years old, is the oldest surviving Hertzler.

Rudy Christian and family made it easy for everyone; they arranged for the assessment and disassembly of the Chamberlin barn during some particularly bleak weather last November. The Park folks (National Trails Open Space Manager Jim Campbell and Clark County Parks Commissioner Tim DeVore) got a taste of our style by coming to the Carriage Hill event, which stood them in good stead when push came to shove this summer.

It was a struggle...

We were smart to bring the leadership team to the Hertzler site in Springfield nearly a week before the participants. Any structure that is dismantled by one crew, only to be repaired and reconstructed by another, is guaranteed to provide some surprises for the folks on the ground. We spent all of our early time trying to figure out what we had, and by extension, what we had to do. Volunteers and students were well served by this prep.

Western Ohio provided abundant humidity, occasional site-clearing rains, and frequent lowest-altitude C5A fly-overs. Our hosts were on top of the hospitality game, providing a well-equipped meeting hall (with A/C and Inter-net access) and signing on an Army cook and his sister from Alabama to put down the remarkable spread. In the Midwest, "love" is spelled F-O-O-D, and we were showered with it. The park folks repeatedly went long and deep to provide the infrastructure we required, immediately and cheerfully, without inquiring too much into our rationale. Springfield, perhaps because of its imploded industrial economy (International Harvester made Scouts and TravelAlls there for a very long time), proved to be an excellent resource for rigging and gear. Nothing (not even Brian Beal's warnings), however, prepared us for the hardness of the hickory that made up most of this frame. There was much wistful talk around the nightly campfires about the virtues of Eastern white pine.

Don't try this at home: we're professionals.
Rudy enumerates all the different ways we could hurt ourselves in this life.

Polychromatic fall protection; setting the braces for an eaves plate from the man basket.

All in all, we percolated along nicely enough under the direction of leadership team Brian Beals, Dane Gustafson, Tom Cundiff, and rookie instructor Kevin Brennan, all with the dedicated support of Project Manager Vincent Leyendecker. Locals Beals and Gustafson provided insider access to some unanticipated replacement timber; the entire team came quite well and generously equipped with tool-ing and such, some that they generously loaned to participants.

Raising day

Nobody does it better than Rudy Christian. We were much delayed in our launch on raising day by the park's need for some extensive ceremony (9 am) and my own fumbling with the clumsy rigging (10 am), but under the direction of raising guy Rudy, we got through the ceremonies in high style (not a dry eye in the crowd). We managed to raise all the bents and walls in good order.

Our only significant delay came from our thrashing by the threshing bay door header that we had fussed over extensively and to good effect in the carving shop but had not spent quite enough time on in the layout shop; the third time we installed it was the final time. Half a day at half speed on Sunday raised up the purlin walls complete so that Monday and half of Tuesday could be devoted to the mighty rafter struggle. We were using fresh-sawn ash rafters (culled from the ash-blight diversion program) that were nice enough, but attaching them to the hickory purlin plates was a struggle at every single connection. Plus, this barn was just big enough, and the foundation just high enough, to make every move off the ground an exercise in patience and the repetitive motion of staging towers, ladders, man lift and man basket. It was supremely slow going, under perfect skies with lower than normal humidity. We got through it with not so much as a banged up fingernail to the credit of the determination and patience of our crew and a bit of good luck.

Gratitude

Scott Northcott and Rod Sienkiewicz are holding this whole thing together with their excellent products (they volunteered for this project, as for many projects before); check them out at www.pegs.us and www.grkfasteners.com. Be sure to tell them we said thanks, and thanks, again. Hats off to manager Jim Campbell, commissioner Tim DeVore, and ranger Bud Jividen, who worked hard (and high off the ground) as timber framers. They were supported by a deep bench of spouses, volunteers, and children in this endeavor. We were there long enough to feel like a kind of family.

Special thanks to Christian and Son, wearers of many hats, as finders, expeditors, advocates, interpreters, and eloquent spokesmen and women, articulating the diverse reasons for taking on this sort of work.

Gratitude especially and without reservation to our leadership team (Beals, Gustafson, Cundiff, and Brennan), special honors to Don Seela and Tom Haanen, and extra credit for Vince Leyendecker and especially Maureen Blackwell, who worked behind the curtain.

Eulogy

Finally, may I direct your attention to the last stanza of the Robert Frost poem "Two Tramps in Mudtime." It is why we succeed.

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight. Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.