A generously illustrated handbook for identifying and understanding structures that symbolize the region's unique cultural and historical landscape.

A generously illustrated handbook for identifying and understanding structures that symbolize the region's unique cultural and historical landscape

The twentieth anniversary edition of the classic architectural study of the development of the connected farm buildings made by 19th-century New Englanders, which offers insight into the people who made them.

A comprehensive and unique visual resource, Barns will be invaluable to students; teachers; researchers; historians of art, architecture, design, and technology; architects; engineers; designers of all kinds; and those who love barns."--BOOK JACKET.

William Faulkner once said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Nowhere can you see the truth behind his comment more plainly than in rural New England, especially Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and western Massachusetts. Everywhere we go in rural New England, the past surrounds us. In the woods and fields and along country roads, the traces are everywhere if we know what to look for and how to interpret what we see. A patch of neglected daylilies marks a long-abandoned homestead. A grown-over cellar hole with nearby stumps and remnants of stone wall and orchard shows us where a farm has been reclaimed by forest. And a piece of a stone dam and wooden sluice mark the site of a long-gone mill. Although slumping back into the landscape, these features speak to us if we can hear them and they can guide us to ancestral homesteads and famous sites. Lavishly illustrated with drawings and color photos. Provides the keys to interpret human artifacts in fields, woods, and roadsides and to reconstruct the past from surviving clues. Perfect to carry in a backpack or glove box. A unique and valuable resource for road trips, genealogical research, naturalists, and historians.

Over 340 color photos display barns in the English and New England styles that dot the landscape of Cape Cod's fifteen townships, including many detail shots. Wooden and stone barns dating from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries appear, including barns for sheltering animals, grain, cranberries, strawberries, turnips, and asparagus.

From hay barns to corn cribs, from fences to chicken coops, from silos to outhouses, 'The Old Barn Book's' clear drawings, photos, maps, and descriptions make it easy to figure what's what around a farm.