Where we've been

It's been a few weeks since my last entry. My excuse? A week on the road for the school spring recess, about two weeks getting over a multi-symptom illness, a day at IU, a day at Purdue, and, finally, two days helping a wheelchair-bound third grader at a school camp. But though I haven't been posting, things have been happening on the Raccoon Creek Community front.

At the end of the spring recess week, two of us attended a program put on by the Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana called Barn Again. We thought it would be useful to know more about old barns, and this program is designed to encourage folks to restore and rehabilitate barns rather than allow them to deteriorate. It was held this year in Corydon at a neat old school house that was part of the Underground Railway.

In addition to the presentation which covered nomenclature of barn parts, and good information on repairing damage, we toured four old barns in the Corydon area. Some have already been rehabilitated. Some need a lot of work. The most interesting thing we saw, though, was not a barn but a spring house, two stories tall, with about a fifty-gallon-per-minute spring flowing into it straight out of a rock wall just about 15 feet away. What a great old building!

At the end of the tour we visited a constructed wetland at a mobile home park not too far north of Corydon. It was helpful to see it, and we might incorporate a constructed wetland into our waste treatment plans.

By far the most significant activity of the day was a visit to a barn that was built before 1875. See a few pictures below. The owner of the barn wanted to find someone who would save it by removing it from her property and reassembling it somewhere else. That would be us.

The barn is very large, in great shape, and has many possibiities. Certainly our hope for a barn that would accommodate a few apartments has been met. In fact, this barn is so large we haven't even begun to consider all the simultaneous uses we may find for it. Some of us are going to visit it again this Sunday, measure it, and maybe start cleaning up the inside.

A fellow was recommended to us who might advise us in dismantling, moving and reconstructing the barn. He thinks he can get us the wooden floor of an old roller skating rink that has been in storage. The barn has no floor now, so the rink floor would be a nice feature and would allow us to build the best darn barn dancing site in Indiana.

We'll be scheduling some work days to take down the parts of the barn we can handle ourselves. If you'd like to see it and maybe help, let us know.