At Home in the Barn

A place of character can make an impact on you as much as a person of character. There are people I have met in my life that never made the impression on me like my grandparents’ barn.

I was six years old when we moved on to the property. We drove in one day from our suburban plot in Northern Virginia to a side road in Southwestern Ontario with a pebbled land, two-story farmhouse, and a three-story barn. There was a forest of pine trees to the southeast of the property with an abandoned sugar shack and a wide-open field with straggling sheep and goals clearing the grass.

We stayed there for a month until the parsonage was ready for our family to move into. While there was room for all of us in the big house from the first day, my father set up our flattop camper beside the barn the first night and last nights to give us the outdoor experience.

I spent most of my spare moments in the barn in the days between. I learned quickly that my grandmother would have chores for me to do if I visited her in the kitchen and my grandfather had other chores for me if I followed him into the field or to the old coach house to take care of the horses.

The barn was a theatre of possibility. I imagined the day when I was strong enough to climb to the top beams and swing back and forth above the weaker beings below me. I found out quickly that burrowing in a pile of straw is more likely to dirty your clothes and reveal unfound allergies than it was to give you a place for a great afternoon nap.

Beyond the downside, it was a great place to talk to the sheep and goats when they were tucked in for the night. You entered through centred doors that were big enough for wagons. There weren’t many windows, just holes for the birds to fly in and out. It was a refuge for all of us. While I might have been scared about living in a new country and in a strange place, I felt safest inside the building that had equal room for animals and humans.

I found the beams holding up the place to be most interesting. They were held up by pegs, not nails. My dad said that the whole design was the same as a cathedral with the columned aisles alongside the central interior. If you brought in pews, you could have a meeting. In fact, my cousins used it for their weddings a few years later.

Even after we moved into the parsonage, the barn was my special refuge. I would ride my bike over to the property on the occasion that there was nothing on television and a Saturday seemed to be taking longer to conclude than normal.

My grandparents eventually figured out that I would actually do chores if I didn’t have to leave the barn. I didn’t mind cleaning the pens for the sheep and goats. I felt like I was doing necessary upkeep on the place. My grandmother put me to work on sweeping the main areas and cleaning the path to the house. I became proud of my role in keeping the place together.

When they aged into their 60s, my grandparents got the idea that they didn’t want to work so much anymore. They hatched a plan on selling the place and running the cash register in the corner store he bought in a neighbouring town. I couldn’t stand the idea since I considered the place my second home.

They sold the place to an auto mechanic who had a kid about my age. We never did much like the Keeners but they were neighbours so there was an element of resignation in that we had to at least try to love them for a little while. The first day I visited them, the son, Tony, took me on a tour as if I were a stranger and explained to me how everything was going to change once they got approval from the city.

“We’re gonna turn the coach house into an auto shop,” he informed me. “The woods will make a good subdivision and, see where the barn is, well, that could be a row of town houses.”

Part of me wanted to burn the whole place to the ground if it meant putting off all of the “development” that the Keeners had planned.

One day, a guy named Dave came by and started kicking at some of the wood slats in the place. Tony’s dad came running in, red-faced and arms flailing.

“Leave that shit alone,” he screamed. “The city’s going to fine me if anything else happens to this place. This is ‘heritage’ wood.”

Dave laughed at him and Tony’s dad shouted him off of his property. He was serious, after all.

We didn’t know what that meant but it seemed like a good enough reason why the pace of change had been so slow on the property. In a year, only the coach house conversion to auto shop had really been completed. There was some issue with the barn and the main house. I noticed that family only really took up three rooms in the place and figured that it was too expensive for them to heat the whole place if they were trying to save their money for renovations and developments.

One day, the Keeners got a letter from the city that put Mr. Keener into a brooding skulk for the entire day. He sat on his picnic table with a six pack of beer, shaking his head bitterly at the letter, picking it up and tossing it down as if some new information might appear if he left it alone for a while.

Tony let me see it. It was printed on city letterhead with an official seal at the bottom.

Re: Buckler Homestead

We have completed our assessment of the property, which includes the main house, coach house, barn, and sugar shack and have determined that all buildings on site qualify for designation as heritage properties with local historical significance.

In particular, the barn exemplifies the functional architectural style of early German settlers to the area. The fact that it was once the home of the founder of the first three schools in the region also makes the site notable. Finally, the house itself, though constructed as late as 1863 is one of the few examples of Georgian architecture in our area. The transom, sidelights, and shutters are worth saving as museum pieces on their own.

Since your property is deemed to have historical significance with regards to the social and community life of our region in addition to links to the history of local and rural education, any or all applications to sever the property or re-zone for development are unlikely to be approved under any circumstances.

I was secretly pleased. The barn was safe.

A few months later, the Keeners put up a “For Sale” sign and I hoped that things might soon go back to normal. The store hadn’t worked out for my grandparents and I held a secret hope that they might come back and use the place as a retirement home.

We had no such luck. The bids came in and the best came from somebody out of Ottawa. Her last name was Buckler and she was the great granddaughter of the schoolmaster and farmer who had built on the land in the first place. She put together a group of relatives to buy the place and run it as an agricultural heritage museum.


While my grandparents weren’t going to move back into the place, there were opportunities for two bored retirees who just closed their corner store and were looking for an opportunity to hone their folksy agricultural arts again. They were hired as “historical interpreters.”


For the next five years, grandpa kept the buildings and land in shape while grandma dressed up in her finest country dress to show people the inside track to making soap, candles, preserves, ice cream and more, all from the comfort of a 19th century country kitchen.

As for me, I could help both of them. The training they gave me as a boy is what got me my first job. I was proud to work beside them every day until they couldn’t do it anymore.