| DECEMBER 4, 2010 -- Everyone knows The Red Barn on Wilton Road facing the Merritt Parkway.
Built to store onions and farming equipment during Westport's agricultural heyday, the imposing local landmark with giant lettering now serves as the setting for sumptuous Sunday brunches, lunches, dinners and banquets.
But how many other barns are still around?
A troupe of volunteers is scouring Westport for the Historical Society to create an inventory of historic barns for the first official ever in Westport.
"Even today, barns and stone walls define our New England landscape and set it apart from farm communities anywhere else in America," said Dorothy Curran, President of the Westport Historical Society.
The curbside survey, being undertaken as part of a statewide project by the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, will also link homeowners with experts in preservation assessment and restoration, Curran said.
"The survey makes no judgments about what owners should do with their barns," Curran said.
But Curran said two historic barns in Westport have recently been lost – one to a deliberate demolition and one to disrepair. She hopes the survey will enhance owners' understanding of the value of their historic barns and efforts to preserve them.
Westport began as a farming community but has been able to hold onto many of its barns by serendipity: Westport artists have saved many from potential ruin by establishing their studios in the large, open spaces.
"Barns hold special interest in Westport because, as farms were abandoned in the early 20th century, many were purchased by the influx of artists – many of whom were raised on the farms in the mid-West – who knew the value of barns and coveted them as studios," Curran said in an email.
"Since those barns continued to be used, they were preserved," she said. "That trend may help explain why Westport today still has as many barns as it does."
The Westport Historical Society recently hosted a regional gathering of preservationists , the 11thsession sponsored by the Trust around the state to carry out a legislative mandate to create an inventory of barns with funding by the Commission on Culture and Tourism.
Todd Levine directs the historic-barns survey for the Trust and he gave a slide show to illustrate to volunteers what to look for and how to fill out inventory forms.
"In 1920, Connecticut had 25,000 farms, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture census," he said. By 2002, the number was down to 5,000, dropping to 2,000 in 2008.
As of three years ago, Levine said, there were only 55 dairy farms left in the state.
The once farming-dense northeastern part of the state – the Thompson, Promfret and Woodstock area - has lost one-fourth of its farms since 1970.
"Barns as a building type are extinct," he said. Without intervention, in 100 years, he said, "they'll all be gone."
"With each barn that is lost, another piece of the state's rich agricultural history disappears," observes Trust literature.
The best "good news" about the survey, Curran wrote in an email, is that once barns are identified, funding is available – for free! – to homeowners to preserve, repair and restore the disappearing assets.
Thanks to a burgeoning interest, the state has been allocating money for grants to homeowners for several years to help defray costs to keep their barns standing.
Last year, the General Assembly allocated $81,000 under the program and 15 applicants won grants, most of them in the amount of $5,000 for assessment and stabilization.
To qualify, the structure must have been used historically for livestock shelter and/or agricultural food production, Levine said.
A Westport barn appeared in his slide presentation as an example of a "gentleman's barn."
That's the unique 3-level stone-and-wood barn on South Compo Road belonging to the Gault family, who arrived in Westport in the mid-19th century, said Curran.
Beautifully preserved, its history will be documented through interviews with the family and other research during the survey.
Lee Hosssler and Frank Pagliardo of Easton were two of the volunteers who stepped into the basement of the Society's home, Wheeler House on Avery Place, to claim a part of their town for the barn survey.
"We lost a barn to a fire [recently]," Pagliardo said.
Installing fire alarms and amending town ordinances to add barns to historic home demolition codes are some of the steps being considered by the preservationists.
The Westport Historical Society is especially eager to get its survey done by the deadline, January 12, 2011, so it can incorporate the wealth of new information in its summer 2011 exhibit, "Back to Our Roots."
The Society does not lack for enthusiasm. So far, 24 volunteers have signed up for to survey a chuck of the town: Katie Chase, Mary Lee Clayton, Andrea Cross, Maggie Feczko, Edward Gerber, Sal Porio, Ken Smith, Linda Gramatky Smith, Betsy Wacker, Marty Skrelunas, Peter Jennings, Bob Weingarten, Karen Weingarten, Lorraine Feliciano, Dianne Wildman, Jack Fanning, Joni Andrews, Larry Untermeyer, Ed van Gelder, Fran Thomas, Kathie Bennewitz, Scott Bennewitz, Lisa Seidenberg and Curran herself. |
