Barn Demolition: Of Crowbar and Profanity

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Photo by Fotolia/Gudellaphoto
The Barn demolition project began with the removal of old wooden shingles, layer upon layer of them, with "a crowbar and profanity."

An Ohio ruralite and essayist, John Baskin has recently published an intriguing book called In Praise of Practical Fertilizer. In it (and in his earlier New Burlington: The Life & Death of an American Village), John paints a many-textured picture of rural life that entertained our editors so much, we just had to share a sample of it with you. (At one point, he even pokes a little friendly fun at MOTHER EARTH NEWS itself, calling it “a periodical for people who feel up the creek without a parable.”) It wasn’t easy to pick just one chapter to share with you — it meant passing up such gems as “Provocative Vegetables” and “Ruminations on Cow Manure” — but we think you’ll be pleased with the following selection on barn demolition and wood recovery.


I have just finished tearing down an old barn, using the time-honored methods of crowbar and profanity. The barn, which belonged to a neighbor, had been damaged by a high wind, and I brought the old building down on its sills as much by an artful use of curt Anglo-Saxon as by the crowbar.

I began on the roof, peeling off the wooden shingles. It looked to be a simple job until I discovered there were about a half-dozen layers where the owner had kept re-roofing the barn over the preceding layer. Future archaeologists, uncovering a section of this roof, would no doubt be able to date the leaky cycles of consternation in the owner’s life by each stratum of shingles. These layers, of course, made the roof exceedingly heavy. It suggested to me why the old barns contained much stalwart underpinning: to hold up the shingles.

  • Published on Jan 1, 1983
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