Keeping a barn full of memories

A tractor-trailer pulled the barn nearly a mile to its new home.

Renovation on the barn will continue through next year.

The barn on Clare and Judy Koenigsknecht’s Fowler, Mich., farm has newly patched siding, new windows, and sits solidly on a new foundation. Soon, it will have custom doors made of old barn wood and a bright red coat of paint.

It looks pretty good for a 70-year-old barn that was slated for demolition. Instead, it took a three-day, 3/4-mile journey to a new home — on the Koenigsknechts’ farm.

A new home maybe, but not a new family. Koenigsknecht and this barn go way back.His parents once rented the farm where the barn originally stood. He can still picture his father carrying lanterns to milk the cows and feed the draft horses in their stalls. He remembers when electricity came to the farm in 1948. At 2½, young Koenigsknecht hovered so closely that the electrician threatened to bury him in the hay.

So when he learned the property owner planned to replace the barn with a metal building, Koenigsknecht felt a loss. He happens to be a self-employed roofer who also restores barns.

“My helper said, ‘You should move it to your place,’” Koenigsknecht says. “I told that to my wife, Judy, and she thought I was crazy. Then we thought about the memories, and it made more sense.”

The barn owner agreed to let Koenigsknecht have the barn, and the journey began.

“Structurally, the barn was perfect,” he says. Its roof even still has the original cedar shingles.

To move the 76x32-foot building, he secured cables from the loft beams to hold it together. The movers he hired jacked up the barn and slid two long and six short steel beams through the bottom. Koenigsknecht stacked 6x6-inch blocking up to the rafter beams.

Initially, the plan was to move it across the field. But the ground hadn’t frozen the winter before, so they decided to take it down the road instead. Koenigsknecht and his son, Kyle, trimmed branches that might hit the wide load that measured 41 feet on the trailer.

On Dec. 3, 2008, the barn began its journey. Electric company workers cut the wire between the barn and the road, and the tractor-trailer inched down the driveway, across a ditch, to the road.

“Once it was on the road, it only took 15 minutes to get to our farm,” Koenigsknecht says. “It took another two hours to get it in the field and off the road.”On day three in the bitter cold, the tractor-trailer driver made the final pull to place the barn in its new home.

“Older people stop by,” Koenigsknecht says. “They are pleased that history is preserved.”

He has photos his mother took of the barn’s raising in 1939. A 93-year-old former hardware store owner told him he helped raise it. Back then, it was tradition for the store to send help when hardware was purchased for the barn.

As a barn restorer, Koenigsknecht is glad he did it too, though he estimates he’ll spend more than $40,000 — with more than half the cost spent on moving. He is using the barn to store some equipment, but also to preserve old barn wood to restore other barns.

Koenigsknecht expects to finish the barn in 2010 to help preserve it for another 70 years. And this time, his labor will be part of its history.