The barn that could (and did) by Leslie Locklear

How some determined “salvage dawgs” gave the iconic Round Mountain barn a second life.

By Leslie Locklear

Self-described “rustoholic” Leslie Locklear reigns over a kingdom of salvaged treasures at Jack’s Cabin Cutoff near the former community that people called Howeville. The “newest” building on the property, a stately barn, harbors its own stories, some from long ago and some from the recent collective efforts that gave it a new life and home. Here is Leslie’s account of those efforts.

I had an itch for another barn.

I needed storage, work space, a place to create. My mom suggested that I ask about the barn standing a ways off of Highway 135 at the base of Round Mountain, and one fall afternoon I happened to see the barn’s owner standing at her gate. I pulled up on the shoulder, introduced myself and asked if she might consider selling that barn. She said she’d consider it, and we left it at that. Well, winter hit with a hard, fast, heavy, worldrecord snowfall. So much snow accumulated that several old buildings in the valley collapsed, and that included the majestic, timbered barn. The walls held, but with the massive snow, the towering cupola took a dive with the roof timbers right down into the center of the barn. Smashed! All smashed! Tears! This whole community shed tears.

A few days later I received a phone call asking if I still wanted the barn. The “salvage dawg” that I am spoke right up and said I’d buy what wasn’t broken or rotten. Immediately I bit my lip, thinking, “What am I gonna do with a pile of wood?”

I met with an engineer. We went over the details needed to save the building. I looked that barn over, through watery eyes, as he told me how bad it was; my heart physically hurt. From the inside I could see a lot of good wood. The upper floor was still intact. At the end of the inspection, the engineer explained that I would be throwing immeasurable amounts of money and time, and lots of new expensive lumber, trying to save this barn. He could build me a new log barn, he said, for less stress and less money, with milled walls that fit perfectly together.

I wasn’t interested. I wanted this one! I wanted its history, its hand-hewn logs, its nails, scratches, all its chewed stalls. I wanted the meaningful feeling that I’d saved someone’s craftsmanship from long ago, the place where the livestock took shelter during the blistering-cold winters. I walked away feeling as broken as the roof timbers.

From there it kinda gets blurry. A call to the owner – and a mental call out to all the doubters – had me saying, “Hold my beer.” Not really knowing how I was going to pull this off, I reminded myself that I’d been binge watching “Barn Wood Builders” for months. I also had some furniture-building skills, having managed properties for 27 years and tinkered on my Jack’s Cabin place for 20.

In my zest, and unbeknownst to my mother, who thought I was going to salvage some barn wood and build a shed, I promised the owner that I would build the barn back as close to original as I could. I would take it all. Clean up everything, every nail, every piece of wood. I would haul the junk away. I would

The relocated, rebuilt barn presides over Leslie Locklear’s kingdom of salvaged treasures.

leave only the original rubble foundation as a landmark.

I managed to get a loan. My brother Larry and his buddy Vic came up from Texas. I enlisted my friends Stacie and Todd Murray to help. I asked a neighboring ranch foreman if I could hire him with his big tractor to pull the remaining upper walls down. He declined and thought I’d lost my mind. That day, Larry cut the upper timbers on one end, and the north wall accordioned slowly down onto the upper floor, stacked doors still perfectly intact. Auspicious start.

In the next “Hold my OTHER beer” moment, I put on a heavy coat and my ski helmet and hooked up my little John Deere 4310 to tow straps tied end to end, while Larry and Vic went to cutting timbers on the south wall. Once the mini tractor was strapped to the first timbers, they gave the ALL CLEAR, but the first pull I made broke the straps. New straps and the next cautious pull lifted the front end of the tractor dangerously off the ground. Don’t tell my mom! With a few more cuts from the chainsaws, the south upper wall came down in slow motion. Stacked doors also intact!

Next came a very painstaking, slow log removal. Teetering one 30-foot log at a time on the lip of the John Deere front loader, with a person on either end of the log, the tractor in granny gear crawled along and then lowered the log gently onto my old trailer. After a few days of that, with such little progress, Larry lost it! He yelled at the helpers to grab the next log, he grabbed the middle, and they muscled that 30-foot log off the barn and threw it, bam, onto the trailer. I explained that this was a sacred historic site and there would be no more of that!

About that time the spirits took pity on me, and a dark sports car pulled into the pasture. As the guy approached, I wondered what this yahoo wanted. Then I recognized Corey Bryndal, whom I’d met briefly at a heated Crested Butte Town Hall meeting. He said he liked barns and wanted to help. With that, he had his new excavator delivered, and he gently but swiftly picked apart and loaded the rest of the logs on my flatbed. Wow, what great friends, old and new. I’m a lucky gal.

Next came many flatbed loads of debris to the dump, countless loads of logs to my place and one load to Montrose to recycle the old wire and junk metal. Every single nail was saved and placed in buckets. From those we brewed rusty nail ”tea” to stain new rough-cut lumber for the beefed-up flooring and framing. This dream was coming

together.

Ironically, when I spoke to Bob Rozman about purchasing lumber, he explained that his father’s sawmill at the end of Elk Avenue had also collapsed from the weight of that winter’s snow. So, we went to work cleaning up that mess, and with some clean-up trade we salvaged partial beams from his broken sawmill. Now, from an unexpected source, I had the support beams for my newly engineered old barn.

In my hunt for a roof, I discovered that the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum in the old Tony’s Conoco building had just been reroofed. Artist Sean Guerrero had hauled all the “antique” patinaed roofing tin off to his place in Paonia, and he generously offered to sell me what I needed at a sweet deal. So off I drove, pulling my trusty old flatbed to reclaim the historic Crested Butte sheet metal. I spent the day sorting through hundreds of sheets of roofing tin, picked out 80 sheets and headed back over Kebler Pass into the darkness.

Around 10 p.m. I stopped somewhere on the pass to check the load. I discovered it had come loose and was tossed about the trailer. I wondered if I’d lost any tin along the way, but on the narrow road there was no way to turn the truck and trailer around to go look. Meanwhile, I waved down an oncoming car to warn the couple to watch out for sheet metal on the road ahead. Instead, when they asked if they were on the road to Lake City (they weren’t), I ended up rescuing them from driving hours in the wrong direction. (There are no mistakes in the universe!) I made my weary way home, with one more thing checked off my “build a barn” list: beautiful, local, well-used, holey, metal recycled roof.

Next I put out an APB for some very tall reclaimed poles to hold up the new roof. Voila! John Murphy answered the call and sold me what I needed for a song. I promised him credit toward some future rust from my treasured collection. Support poles: check.

To honor my new friend, the barn’s previous owner, I asked her to join me for the ground-breaking at the new site on my property. With shovels in hand, we performed a small but significant ceremony. Now it was time to get the tractor and start digging.

I affectionately call my John Deere tractor “my boyfriend.” He handles all my big jobs. He lives under the stairs right outside my window so I can admire him. He starts on a dime, is always there when I need him

The rebuilt barn has the same dimensions as before, with a steeper roof for snowshed.

and never argues or cheats! So I warmed his glow plugs, cranked on the key, drove him over to the site, backed the little guy up, set the feet on his backhoe, and began nibbling at the rock-hard ground. Larry and Vic started heckling me. “It’ll be winter by the time you pull the dirt out of there!” “One big rock and you’ll tip over that toy tractor!” About that time Corey Bryndal, miraculously, appeared and offered to bring his glorious excavator over again. In no time, he dug the foundation. I foresaw more heckling: “Poor John Deere was out-did by a Trackhoe.”

Next the concrete was poured, set up and inspected. Then Vic and crew set the logs. Wood salvaged from the original dairy stalls became the lower support poles, with Bob Rozman’s reclaimed beams placed above to hold up the second floor. Vic built new, beefed-up, rough-cut, rusty nail teastained floors. John Murphy’s tall poles were installed to hold up the roof. I begged my neighbor Eric Iverson to help me, and he beautifully faced the upper walls using the original wide-planked floors of the old barn. He rebuilt the original doors and damaged cupola. At this point, I had a panicked, heart-crushing few days when Eric saw the old, bent, holey tin that had come off Tony’s Conoco. He said it couldn’t be used. But with some coaxing and research, he went to hammering the tin down and epoxying all the previous nail holes. Soon an amazing roof crowned the barn.

From the old barn site, under the years of cow manure, Vic found and restored giant, thick-planked, weathered, Douglas fir flooring. The dairy cows had stood many a cold morning on that, and my dear friend John Polzin built the most amazing interior stairs with those planks. Metal railing plucked from a neighbor’s dump trailer became rails for the balcony. I located old, operable windows from the side of the road in front of the “Magnolia” cabin in Gunnison. Those were installed alongside reclaimed windows I got from Julie Robinson of Habitat For Humanity.

The Round Mountain barn is truly a gift from the higher realms. It taught me to ask, do the work, and be open to what the universe has to offer.

Oh, but there’s more to be done – like chinking. What are you doing in late June? Perhaps a chinking party? b

If chinking isn’t your thing, you can support Leslie’s endeavor via her Go Fund Me page: Jack’s Cabin Historic Barn Restoration Project. Or buy an antique treasure from her backyard collection (Highway 135 at Jack’s Cabin Cutoff), or shop her repurposed art at the Paragon Art Gallery in Crested Butte.