The Old Barn Model: A Serendipitous Encounter (Part 1 of 3)
by Hugh Fraser, OBP President for 2023-2024
In September 2022, I worked three days on behalf of Ontario Barn Preservation at our inaugural display at the Outdoor Farm ShowTM, just west of Woodstock. This event hosts tens of thousands of farmers from across Canada. OBP had a modest display with two six foot long tables under a small tent. We showed a map of Ontario and invited people to place a pin at the location of their old barns. We also displayed a small Fischer-PriceTM barn that so many young kids played with in their youth, the idea being that farmers’ kids would drag their parents into our tent. But our largest display was a scale model of a swing beam barn my son-in-law and I constructed. It was nothing special, but it was constructed to be collapsible for transport (Figure 1).
Our model barn certainly did draw people in, including one man from Manitoba who said it was completely by accident that he happened to stroll by our display. He had displayed at the show himself in years past when he was involved in the farm machinery industry. He asked me about what swing beam barns were all about in Upper Canada, how we had constructed the model and he asked detailed questions that no other visitors posed. Clearly, he knew a lot about old barn construction. After spending about an hour analyzing our model, he introduced himself as John Ness and asked me a pointed question: Would we like him to build us a more detailed model of an old barn to display at shows? He pulled out his smartphone and showed me several photos of barn models he had built in the past. He explained this was his hobby over the cold, dark Manitoba winters (Figures 1 to 5).
I was blown away by the incredible detail, the patience of this man and the love of old barns he must have possessed. Of course we were interested in having a beautiful model of an old barn to put on display, but we were just a non-profit organization with limited funds. However, we couldn’t afford to pay John for the incredible number of hours it would take to build a model!
But John wasn’t looking for reimbursement. He said he enjoyed this work as a hobby and he knew a detailed model might help OBP draw attention to saving old barns. He agreed to build a scale model barn based on a representative old barn of OBP’s choice. He said he could build it in time to display at the 2023 Outdoor Farm Show. Over the following months, I thought about John’s offer and discussed it with other OBP Directors. John and I spoke on the phone and discussed the project over email. We then hatched a plan for the perfect old barn to model. In my next blog, I will describe this barn and the unique challenges John Ness faced.
