Barn Records and History

By John Busch, OBP Regional Rep. for Middlesex, Elgin, Chatham-Kent, Essex, and Lambton. (Includes London, Strathroy, and St. Thomas)

I have often remembered conversations among farmers about the old days when they exchanged labour and equipment on a sharing basis.  For example, in my younger days on the farm, I remember our threshing machine which would do our threshing, with the help of a few neighbours, and then dad would hit the road to do the threshing for the farmers who did not have a threshing machine.  I seem to remember he threshed first for the farmers who had already provided help with our threshing.  On the days that the threshing happened on our farm, the tractor and machine were only shut down for mealtimes, and the kitchen was full of hungry men.  My job in those days was to keep the grain flowing in the granary.

I never really thought much of how they kept records of who helped whom and when, it just somehow happened.  I would suppose everyone kept written notes about who worked for whom, and how much the neighbour owed Dad in cash for threshing their crop after subtracting the labour for our own threshing.  

Later in my life, when I became more interested in barns in this province, I learned to start snooping around the barns for notes and records and found that they could be in the strangest places. For example,  I found my grandfather’s initials carved in the threshing floor wall on the smoothest lumber in the barn.  Those initials would have been dated in the early 1900s and incidentally, I had to take the photo of the initials from the stable floor as some of the threshing floor had caved in.  Another barn I was in recently had initials outlined by nail heads in the posts on each side of the threshing floor. The most interesting barn in which I found informal records was one not far from the second barn I mentioned.

The granary was on the second floor, as is often the case, and it was a low-light situation.  We could see a caricature of a pig, curly tail, and all on the lower right of the wall  I grabbed this first photo of the wall as I suspected there was more information on the wall.

If you look carefully, you can see the drawing of the pig.  Once I viewed the photo on my computer, I could see lots of other information.  By playing with the shading, contrast, and other settings, the rest of the information on the boards started to jump out. 

When I look at the shaded photo, I can see areas where they recorded using tally marks, at times as many as 65.  They also recorded the numbers 6250 and 6995,  1333 plus 150= 1483, 182R for example.  Then I can make out ‘S W’ 1923 and later on, it looks like two signatures, one was ‘S White’ and the second one ‘Bill Stevens’, again 1923 is recorded.  On the lower right, we can really see the drawing of the pig, quite realistic actually,  and beneath it I would describe what looks like a side of beef.  Beneath that,  I can see the line ‘Killed at Chatham, (maybe a month and day but nearly illegible) 1925’, or it may be 1923 also.

To reconstruct this, it looks like two farmers were part of what happened on this farm at least in 1923/25, and they kept track of perhaps acres, bags of grain, and hours owed, but they were also tracking butchered animals.  Chatham is only a few miles North of this location so it would perhaps make sense that they had the animals slaughtered in Chatham, and these two guys did the rest of the butchering on the farm.  I think this was common in the old days, sharing the butchering and the proceeds, as one family could not keep that amount of meat from spoiling for very long.  On a side note, I remember on our farm there was a lean-to on the North side of one building that had piles of sawdust on the floor, and the explanation was that it was the icehouse of old.  It follows that they kept any items that could spoil buried in the sawdust with the chunks of ice they buried in there during the winter.  I have no idea how long it kept but I think not very long.

The current owner of this last barn advises there was a family that lived across the road at one time by the name of White and a Stevens who lived less than a mile away, so it was very likely they shared some of the work by working together until their families grew up.

On the last photo, where I really cropped the first photo, I concentrated on the bottom portion where the most dominant signatures were.  You can see many tally marks, likely scratched with a nail, the two animals, and the line about ‘Killed in Chatham’.  I have no doubts about the pig drawing as there is a bit of detail there, and it took a while to figure out the side of beef, but I believe I came to the correct conclusion.  I think most of this work was done with a pencil.

It tells one that we should be looking for clues in the barn, mostly in likely places, but sometimes in unlikely places, like a post.  If nothing else, it may point to a date. When I go in a barn, I often just explore before I start to record.  I spend time looking for records, initials, and writing, (one barn with a stencilled painted name that the owner had never seen in the past) and I just collect the information first so I can have a really good look at home on a larger screen.  It is hard to decipher the names and information at times, but if it is properly recorded, one can spend time on it at their leisure.  Using a digital camera is perfect for this as you can bring all kinds of software into play to help decipher the wall. I always take a flashlight with me now, so I don’t miss anything in the dark corners.

Enjoy exploring your barns.

_{To all OBP blog readers: If you have not already done so, please support not-for-profit, volunteer-run, Ontario Barn Preservation by becoming a member! Also, if you are in the business of repairing, reconstructing, engineering, designing, etc. old barns, please consider advertising your amazing skills on our Barn Specia-List. If you own an old barn that you would like to offer to someone else, or you are hoping to obtain one for your own project, make use of our Barn Exchange page. If you own an old barn and would like to save it in the virtual world for future old barn lovers, historians and researchers, check out our Your Old Barn Study page. And please send us your own barn story, photos and/or art for submission as a OBP blog posting for the enjoyment and education of all barn lovers! info@ontariobarnpreservation.com}