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Raising
Of Barn To Follow Razing Of Barn
By Lisa J. Davis
The Winchester Star - Tuesday, September 9, 1997
It's the kind of thing so typical to the fields of the Shenandoah
Valley that you can drive by it every day without noticing it.
But this old gray barn, beaten for decades by the elements and
long ago abandoned by the farmer who built it, did get noticed.
Not it will get a new home.
The massive 1920's structure stands proudly in a 7-acre field
near Winchester Regional Airport, amid the construction of Pegasus
Business Center. In fact, it's situated right where the center
intends to expand.
But instead of dooming it to demolition like hundreds of its peers,
the owners of Adams-Legge Cos. decided to save what they consider
to be a little bit of unheralded history.
"All this land was farmed even before the airport was here,"
said R.J. Turner, a real estate agent with Adams-Legge Development.
"The Adams family likes to preserve things."
So when plans for the business center began sprawling toward the
barn, Turner started some high-tech hawking. A quick surf on the
Internet turned up about 20 businesses that procure antique barns
and, after three months of calling, the barn was sold to a Luray
resident.
The buyer owns a home near Luray with a historic designation,
Turner said, but needs some storage for a working farm. Erecting
a new barn would have voided the historic designation.
So piece-by-piece, the 50-foot-by-100-foot barn is being carefully
disassembled and taken to Luray, where it will be resurrected.
Standing near the Barn's concrete foundation on Monday, builder
Kevin McWilliams scanned up the weathered gray planks that will
slowly come down over the next month. Besides being a challenge
he's never faced, McWilliams said the barn is a beautiful monument
to history.
For many years, the owner of Quality Building in Strasburg has
torn down similar structures that were considered by owners to
be dangerous and useless. Often he uses the aged wood to build
furniture with an antique character he said no new wood can offer.
"It's neat for someone to actually tear one of these down
and put it back up," he said.
The first think to go was the rust-speckled tin roof. Late last
week, a three-person crew climbed atop the towering barn, slowly
exposing the cross section of wooden beams that tightly held the
roof in place.
Now the slow work has turned to cleaning the wood with a high-pressure
hose to remove dirt and mildew. Other than the 40-foot lift boom
used to hoist workers wielding cleaning hoses, no other heavy
machinery will be used.
Next, the mortise and tenon joints must be carefully unsecured.
Each board will be marked with colored tags to identify its place
during the reconstruction. "That way, there's no second-guessing
it," McWilliams said.
The interior will be removed and the long planks that have stood
as walls for more than 60 years will be the last things to come
down. "It will be dismantled exactly the same way it went
up," McWilliams said. "It's basically a reverse operation.
It goes back up the same way it went down."
A small silo attached to the rear of the barn also will be moved
as one piece. A larger concrete silo, which stands nearby, will
remain. Turner said it will be incorporated in the company's plans
for the business center. Not far away, a farmhouse situated in
the business center is being used as an office building.
Once the barn is moved, it will take McWilliams and his crew at
least three months to bring it back to life atop a new foundation.
Although there will be some cosmetic work done, such as a paint
job, the aim is to preserve its integrity. "It'll look the
same, but it'll have a facelift," he said.
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