A barn on the corner of Pinnebog Road and M-142 caught my eye. I like the contrast of the white metal roof with the gray wood siding and the red doors. The horizontal lines of the white rails above the doors punctuate the barn's shape. A stone foundation completes the look.
Huron County has many fine old barns like this one. The county is a good place to drive the back roads and see these structures built years ago. Built to house and feed a small herd of cattle with hay mows above, the barns are now basically used for storage.
Ed and I are uniquely rural people in that the home farms of all four of our parents still have barns. Both my mother and father came from farms south of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin where the barns are both in use. Here in Huron County, the barns on Ed's mother's side and his father's side still stand on the home farms. One of Ed's goals is the restoration of the barn at Graywood Farm which is where his mother grew up.
These barns now stand as tributes to the farm families who worked the land. That land and those farms produced people like our parents who, in many cases, went off to college and found careers in the professions. All of that milk and hay and those beans and eggs turned into educations for a generation born on the farms of the Midwest.
More barns:
The New Red, White and Blue
Haying 1991
Second Cutting
Copyright 2012
Wanda Hayes Eichler
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