So how does someone who has spent the last 20 years teaching historic preservation to college students suddenly make the transition to farming? As it turns out, by pretty much practicing what he has been preaching. We arrived at the farm in Leicester, North Carolina (Buncombe County) about a month ago, on the 23rd of May. For the first week we stayed with our son Rob at his house in Asheville while we shifted way too much packed stuff around enough to set up a couple of beds and find some dishes and pots and pans. We spent the first actual night at the farm on Sunday the 28th. The adventure had begun.
The goats had preceded us to North Carolina by several months, boarding at a place that turned out to be only about a mile away from the farm, over a hill. (Everything is ‘over a hill’ in Buncombe County.) They started dropping kids about the time we arrived and so we threw together some hasty kidding stalls, which will be the subject of a later post. But the initial big restoration project is what will be the loafing barn for the goat herd. It was the milking barn when the farm was a cow dairy, decades ago, and since the ‘80s had been a hangout for beef cattle. For various reasons, all of them understandable, it had started to come apart. My quick assessment last summer when I first looked at the farm, was that one of the long walls had fallen off the foundation, causing a noticeable sag. Quick assessments can often be wrong, which is what mine turned out to be. Once we removed a cattle loading chute that had been built next to the failing wall, cut down some trees and tore out a bunch of poison ivy that was growing all over the corner of the barn – I am still sporting the effects of that – it became clear that the wall had not fallen off the foundation but that the foundation itself had come apart.
Farmers, of necessity, have to do lots of different things. That is one of the most admirable things about farmers. The danger comes when those farmers start to think they know what they are doing when they do all those different things. Whoever built the foundation of the soon-to-be goat loafing barn did not have a clue about what he was doing or how brick foundations work. My repair was effective, but from the point of view of historic preservation, it was a Frankenstein job: I am not proud of it aesthetically, but for the first time in decades the walls of the barn stand straight and plumb. Well, sort of.
