Barns: Variations Reflecting the Spread of Knowledge

Although industry was a growing component of the economy in 1860, America remained in large part a farming nation, and barn were ubiquitous farm structures. Barns of the day were almost all rectangular structures. Circular barns and barns built as polygons were promoted later in the nineteenth century, although a few existed in earlier times. The Shaker community in Hancock, Massachusetts built a magnificent round barn in 1826; it still stands although with a modified roof structure. While not technically a barn, an octagonal barn-like structure was built in 1761 to house a hot spring in Bath County, Virginia; the original structure is long gone, but two white wooden multi-sided structures cover the two larger hot spring pools, one for men’s bathing, and the other for women.

Among the rectangular there were (and remain among surviving old barns) certain regional variations, and within the regions where certain design elements are shared by a significant portion of the barns there are further individual variations. To paraphrase Mark Twain, it was as though all the barns were trying to look alike and not succeeding.

Like any other structure, the barn is designed to accommodate the activities expected to be conducted within them in light of prevailing ideas of how the design would best achieve the intended result. The variations are driven by the crops that will be grown locally and whether the barn will serve a single purpose or multiple purposes. For example, a barn for air-curing tobacco was generally used only for that task and has various slats and adjustable ventilators to regulate the airflow. A barn in wheat country likely served multiple purposes such as housing farm animals, storing grain and hay produced on the farm, and providing an area for threshing the wheat to separate the kernel from the chaff. Other factors affecting design are climate and prosperity – a farmer does not need to house his animals if the climate is at least temperate year round; and a farm that does not produce a large surplus does not need a large structure to house it.

The people from England and the various places in continental Europe who came to America brought their local ideas about how a barn should function and how it should look. Barns built by English settlers in America were said to be identical with those they left behind in England, the principal difference being that in England barns were built of stone, while in America they were built of wood – wood famously being scarce in England and abundant in America. A typical English barn in America consisted of two side compartments, called bays, connected by a central passthrough (another bay) with a gabled roof covering an upper hayloft.


A very detailed study of a structure called the Pennsylvania Barn traces its design back to areas in Switzerland from which various immigrants came to different sections of Pennsylvania and were included within the peoples referred to collectively as Pennsylvania Germans. The study also traces the evolution of barn designs in those parts of Switzerland from rudimentary beginnings to increasingly large and more complex structures until the design essentially matched that of the Pennsylvania Barn, which coincided with the time when people started leaving Switzerland for America.


The Pennsylvania Barn was a structure of two or more stories. Animals were housed on the lower level, and doors on the long side of the barn permitted their entrance and exit. The second level of the barn extended beyond the wall of the lower level, creating an overhang that provided some shelter from the rain and a larger floor space on the second level. The barns either were built into a hillside or had a large earthen ramp on the long side opposite the overhang. This arrangement permitted teams pulling wagons to be driven into the second level of the barn. That level generally included storage for grain and hay, which could be thrown down to feed the animals below, as well as a space to threshing.


Whatever the style or design of barn being built in any given area, others in the area might tend to emulate it because it was familiar and they had seen how the structure functioned, but of course people borrowed, improvised, modified and rebuilt as their inclinations or their needs directed them. The decade leading up to 1860 saw different designs published in various agricultural magazines.

The changes in a new or rebuilt barn could be expressed as a modified design or an addition to a structure built upon a customary design. One such add-on was a hay hood – an extension of the roof at the peak of the gable end of the roof, sometimes with additional outer walls, to provide protection from the weather when using a pulley to load hay into the loft. A gable ventilator was a similar structure that let air into the loft – to prevent a heat build up that could lead to spontaneous combustion – that excluded rain and snow.

The invention of the “horse power”, a treadmill for horses that was used as a power source to run farm machinery, led some farmers to build additions to their barn, called “horse power sheds”, in order to house these devices.

In sum, although the basic barn in the years leading up to 1860 was a rectangular structure, various different design solutions made it functional for the purposes of the time, the place and the activities carried on in and around the structure. The design in each case was the product of knowledge and experience, guided perhaps by tradition but also open to variation from other examples seen, suggestions received and experiments tried.