Resurrecting the Past Preserving the Harriman Barn by leigh macmillen hayes
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uilt between 1800 and 1820, the Harriman Barn in Lovell once housed horses and hay on Slab City Road. In notes Cathy Stone of Lovell Historical Society shared, “According to the Fox family, who sold the structure, it was reported that the barn came from ‘down the street, probably on Heald Pond Road near the Gardiner’s home where an early foundation could be seen.’” David Harriman had it moved to property on Slab City that he’d purchased from Sampson Heald’s estate in 1845. The homestead was later sold to Charles H. Fox in 1916 and Frederick C. Fox in 1988. The building was originally a 30’ x 34’ hand-hewn English frame (eave entry). Eng-
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lish style means that the main doors were on the barn’s side wall rather than the end gable wall. It would have been organized as a four bent, three bay system with the center aisle or bay serving as the threshing floor and two outside bays: tie up on one side; and the mow (pronounced MAU, not MOE) on the other where hay or grain in the sheaf was stored.
“Twenty to thirty percent of antique frames have either been moved once or cut from other frames,” explains local timber framer J. Scott Campbell of Maine Mountain Post and Beam in Fryeburg. “It’s important to save these buildings. Many have been neglected for 60 or 70 years since they were built for farming techniques that were basically dated prior to the Second World War. It’s amazing that some are still standing. A great way to save a barn is to disassemble it.” Like many Maine barns, this one had fallen into disrepair. Just before it was about to be razed as an exercise for the Lovell Fire Department, Scott invited Interior Designer Robin Taylor-Chiarello, who serves as a board member of the National Council on White House History and associate member of the American Institute of Architects, to look at it. “Scott and I stood on a knoll with the sun streaming through the trees onto the rusted roof,” says Robin. “It needed attention and I fell in love with the beams and in awe of what had happened in it for the past 200 years. I’ve been intrigued by the design of old barns and their history and potential for creativity. It’s about not only saving them, but also relocating them and then the creativity involved in adaptive reuse.” “When we walk inside, they speak to us,” says Scott. “Older buildings have soul and we feel it and see all the work that went into it.” Before he could take the frame down, Scott had to strip the building by peeling off all the tin and wooden shingles upon the roof, and removing doors, windows, and siding. He salvaged as much as possible, including the floor boards, but he said that an enormous amount couldn’t be saved. Once the timber frame was exposed, he began to document it with scale drawings. Beam by beam, he drove out the pegs that held the frame together and measured, tagged all the parts and noted those corresponding tags on his drawing. “I use a grid system to label the parts depending on how it’s oriented, for instance G-1-1 means Girt One in Bent One,” explains Scott. “I label everything on the outside, which is not as pretty as the Roman Numeral marriage marks chiseled into the wood by the original builders.” As he began disassembling the barn, Scott noted that there was a 46’ sill timber underneath so he surmises that a 12’ bent was added after it was moved to Slab City.