It probably started life as a tobacco barn, but the small square windows cut into each bent indicate it had been converted into a stock barn at some point, likely for horses.

It had been a long time since it had been used for any thing — small trees grew from the edges of the barn and siding was missing, tin had come off the roof and not been repaired. It was just an old barn between Millersburg and Paris but when it was taken down this fall i noticed it because of its absence from the landscape, it was something that had been constant even as the road had been widened, rerouted and expanded from two lanes to four. It was always there, now it wasn’t.

Driving my wife and kids to yet another horse show, I started wondering what was that place’s history? What was its story? I’m a farmer and I work in barns — taking care of horses, cows, harvesting tobacco are all among the things I’ve done in barns.

The nostalgia I have is kind of unusual I suppose, but the best memories I have of my youth happened in barns. Dad raised tobacco and he had a captive labor force in three sons that needed to get out of the house from time to time to preserve my mother’s sanity. Dad’s barn was at the end of a mile and a half gravel road to “the back part of the place.” It was built by my great grandfather, my mother’s grandfather, who had to rebuild it after it was spun off its foundation by a tornado around 1900. Fixing the barn was what he was doing when he fell and was knocked out cold. His farm hand who lived nearby in a tenant house brought him to that house and sent for a doctor and priest to heal him or read him his last rites, unusual for a Presbyterian, but his tenant was Irish Catholic and thought it couldn’t hurt. Great-grandfather Pyles got better but lost his sense of smell, handy when you need to chase a skunk from under a hen house but not always pleasant when you come home from doing that.

Dad had us at the barn every weekend doing something; it was the spot we started at whenever we were doing any job in tobacco, we spent hours dripping in sweat housing tobacco. I was a top rail man, and if i was too slow my brother Jamie would playfully/painfully stab me in the leg with a stick of tobacco to speed me up.

Our stripping room was wood and Dad nailed cardboard over the cracks to keep the wind out, an old pot belly stove fed coal and wood kept frostbite at bay, until our grandmother seeing the squalor her grandsons toiled in, insisted my Papaw build us a decent stripping room. It was concrete block, with insulation in the ceiling, a real chimney, we alternatively heated with kerosene, that stank and made me light headed, bottled gas and finally a wood stove I bought at Coast to Coast one winter. I ripped my pants unloading it. Dad still liked the kerosene, but in an hour or so the wood stove had a better heat, warmer feel than anything else.

I learned our family’s history there, the stories of my dad going to UK and earning the Keeneland Scholarship, how he was valedictorian of the class of 58 at Minerva High School, how mom made him an angel food cake every time he cane to dinner when they were dating and that he didn’t really like angel food cake.

The days were long and we’d always need to “strip one more bench” before we went home for lunch. John, my little brother was always ready to quit for lunch and Jamie and I would tease him about our favorite meals. It was pure torture but fun loving and happy banter.

As an FFA project Jamie had hogs in that barn, far off the road with no running water so we hauled water, and watered and fed the hogs every day. One night we were fattening a Holstein steer for slaughter and we hadn’t fed it till it was late at night, we went to the barn and when we flipped the lights on a huge rat, “as big as a raccoon” ran straight at Jamie, he jumped up on a tractor and I had to feed that night.

So many good memories of that barn, just thinking of it or when i see it on the farm I’m back in time with my Dad and my brothers.

But this affinity for the “barn” of my childhood isn’t unique to me. A friend that is a nationally recognized cattle breeder sometimes speaks fondly of his chore of sweeping the dirt floor of their family barn every night, and another friend tells of how his grandfather would take him fishing after he swept his grandpa’s barn.

My wife and I have the stall door of the stall that her grandfather, a coal mine engineer built for the stall of her first horse, one she won many championships on, the stall was over engineered but defiantly that horse wasn’t getting out, I guess someone that builds safety bracing in coal mines isn’t going to cut any corners. Her Dad took me to the barn to help unload hay the first summer we were dating, free labor was something my father-in-law to be couldn’t pass up.

There’s the barn on my friend’s farm where we’d go and help him feed silage and milk their cows. Usually he had two or three of us come help out so he’d get his chores done and could go to the football or basketball game.

I have two daughters and a wife and all three are horse crazy. I get to spend a lot of time at the barn taking care of horses, bringing the kids to see the horses. This year we got a goat for my oldest to show at the fair and of course we had to get one for the youngest too. In a huge verbal slipup I said at a store that had baby chicks for sale “we could get some and raise them and have our own eggs.” Now I have chickens and my girls fight (playfully, or bitterly) over the right to carry the egg basket to the barn and bring back the eggs.

There are barns where fathers and mothers have taught their kids to care for livestock, groom show animals for the fair, barns that just passing by a traveler wouldn’t notice till it was gone. But those memories made in the wooden walls reach farther and last longer than the buildings themselves. Barns don’t just store the harvest they are a field of memories whose harvest is kept near our hearts.

Danny Collins is a May’s Lick farmer and former Ledger Independent reporter. He farms on Locust Bend Farm which has been in his family for generations.

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Danny Collins

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