Dorothea Lange took this photograph of a dairy barn in Yamhill County, OR, in 1939. It is a typical transverse-crib barn, a type “useful for dairy, ranch, and farming operations.”
This west elevation shows an example of a large dairy horse barn in Glen Arbor, MI, the D.H. Day Farm. The delineator was Ron Havelka, 1987.
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American Barns Barns
by John Michael Vlach
W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY; 2003
400 pp.; 800+ b&w photographs, plans and elevations;
CD-ROM; $75
ISBN 0-393-73086-7
Reviewed by Martha McDonald
Latest in the Norton/Library of Congress Visual Sourcebooks in Architecture, Design & Engineering series, John Michael Vlach’s Barns is a tour de force. It offers 400 pages of information, along with almost 1,000 illustrations (black-and-white photographs, plans and elevations) to illustrate the different types of barns, their uses, history and regional influences. Norton has teamed up with the Library of Congress to launch the series, which also includes Lighthouses and Bridges (see Traditional Building, October 2007, page 162). Like the others in the series, Barns includes a companion CD-ROM containing all of the images.
The book is divided into an introduction, “Barns Across America,” followed by nine chapters organized by geographic regions: “New England,” “Shaker Communities,” “The Mid-Atlantic,” “The Lowland South,” “The Upland South,” “The Midwest,” “The Southwest,” “The West” and “The Far West.” As described in the introduction, the chapters appear in chronological order of the development of the United States:
While there is much that can be learned by browsing through these assembled images, the photographs and drawings in Barns are arranged in order to convey a particular story of movement across time and space. Barns serve here as physical evidence of the key stages in American settlement history and as markers of specific pathways followed during the process of transcontinental migration. The flow of images runs from the eighteenth century to the twentieth and from the East to the West.
Following the introduction, each chapter is subdivided according to appropriate barn types. For example, the chapter on the Midwest – which includes Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin – includes sections on log barns, New England-influenced barns, Mid-Atlantic-influenced barns, transverse-crib barns, French barns, German barns, horse barns and stables and outbuildings. Each section includes a brief introduction followed by pages filled with photographs, floor plans and elevations.
The “How to use this Book” page at the beginning explains the coding in the captions and the abbreviations. For example, P&P refers to Prints and Photographs Division while AFC is the American Folklife Center. It is interesting to note that the photographs were taken over a period of many years, starting in the 1930s, and many of them were taken by well-known photographers such as Dorothea Lange. Other photographers’ names that appear often, representing photographs taken during several decades, include Jack E. Boucher, Russell Lee, Ben Shahn, Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, Jet Lowe and Carl Mydans.
The captions are a primary source of information throughout the book. Paired with black-and-white photographs that show the barns in various states of repair, the captions are usually brief, providing only basic information on the barn and the photographer, but they often also include a couple of sentences with information on the structure shown. For example, one caption in Chapter 8, “The West,” states: “Barn near Escalante, Utah. April, 1936. Dorothea Lange, photographer.”
Another, number 8-050, reads: “Front of Gunnarson farm barn, New Sweden, Bonneville, Idaho. Lon Johnson, photographer, 1994. The unusual addition to the front of this barn is a hay hood that was built all the way to ground. Usually enclosed hay hoods have front and side walls that reach down no more than a few feet.”
The floor plans and elevations are also valuable sources of information. They are drawn to scale and are quite often very detailed. Again, the captions provide information on the delineator as well as the location of the structure itself.
Certain types of structures, such as three-bay barns and transverse-crib barns, appear frequently. Three-bay barns first appear in the New England chapter:
The three-bay barn is composed of three primary sections: a central wagon passageway flanked by two storage areas. Usually symmetrical in form, one side was sometimes built larger than the other in order to better serve a more specialized function. The hay storage bay, for example, might be larger than the section outfitted with cattle or horse stalls. The cultural source for New England’s three-bay barns is easily traced to the British Isles, where the form has been in continuous use since the Middle Ages.
Transverse-crib barns, according to the introduction, became the dominant type of barn in the U.S. In the chapter on the West, for example, it notes: “The transverse-crib barn, or one of its variants, thoroughly dominates the agricultural landscape of the West. This building was already a popular barn in the Midwestern heartland when the West was opened for settlement.” The style was also popular in the Far West, an area where farms sometimes included wineries and fruit-packing sheds.
Barns surveys all types and sizes of farm structures in the U.S. They range from large barns to small log barns, chicken coops and other outbuildings. Most are working structures but many others seem to be abandoned or no longer in use. An extensive bibliography, glossary, index and numerous footnotes, 36 in the introduction alone, are helpful tools for navigating through the book. Also helpful are the numerous references to specific photographs in the text.
History and architecture buffs and scholars alike will find valuable information in this book, as would anyone with even a passing interest in American barns. The book could be read quickly, sweeping through the photographs and history of American barns, or more likely, it could be studied often, always providing some new detail or tidbit of information. 
«BACK TO NOVEMBER 2007 TABLE OF CONTENTS
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