By Rhonda McCurry
The famous Warkentin Barn at Halstead has its place as a National Historical Landmark and its owners Jere Dean and Mickey Fornaro-Dean, love having that piece of history as home to their beloved horses.
In nearby Mount Hope, the three grandsons of the builder of the Bardshar Barn, take pride in maintaining and restoring the historic barn that is part of the family legacy.
This slideshow offers a look at the two barns and the families that own them.
NATIONAL LANDMARK:
The Warkentin Barn, Halstead, is a two-and-a-half story barn owned by Jere Dean and Mickey Fornaro-Dean, a couple who loves farm history as much as they love each other. The Dean's relish in the tales about the two-story farmhouse and its National Historic Landmark status given by the U.S. Department of the Interior.
EAST SIDE:
The east side of the Warkentin Barn shows off its unique T-shape. The original barn was finished in 1874 and the north addition was added several years later to store hay for livestock and offer additional stalls for draft work horses.
HORSE STALLS:
The Warkentin Barn can hold 24 draft horses in its main floor area. The Dutch stalls were built to be large enough for carriage and work horses and are still used today by the Dean's horses, each of whom have a stall of their own decorated with their name.
HAY CHUTE:
Wooden timber horse stalls have held up in the Warkentin Barn for 138 years. These rooms designed for carriage horses have steel bars on the windows to protect the glass. A large wooden chute sits in-between two feed troughs in each stall, allowing a farm hand to simply drop loose or flaked hay down from the loft above.
SOUTH ENTRANCE:
Upon entrance from the south barn doors of the Warkentin Barn, a wooden staircase leads upstairs to an expansive hay loft. Under the staircase is a storage room that could have been an office. Take note of the herringbone brick flooring to protect horses from slipping. Antiques of the current owners also decorate the barn.
THE SYSTEM:
The 138-year-old Warkentin Barn utilized a steam engine, housed in an outside building to power a belt that was attached to these wheels and to the engine house. Grain wagons pulled inside the barn and grain was unloaded, lifted to the top of the barn above grain bins. The grain was ground and then dumped into the bins to feed the horses.
BARDSHAR BARN:
The Bardshar Barn, Mount Hope, has a permanent foundation made of concrete that was mixed and poured on site, a new technique in 1913. It is owned by three brothers whose grandfather, Jay Bardshar, built it. Concrete makes up the entire flooring as well as the first six feet of the walls above ground and three feet of structural support underground.
GRAIN CHUTES:
Jim Bardshar points to a place in the barn wall where a belt ran indicating capacity for each of two grain bins. The barn had a seven-foot basement that housed a 300-gallon pressure tank, which ran water into the barn and across the driveway to the farmhouse twice a day. The three-cylinder pump drove off the same belt from the elevator drive shaft (pictured here).
ROOF PROJECT:
The barn underwent a major roof project in 1980. After 37 years, the barn's original wood shingles had been replaced by asphalt shingles. These lasted another 30 years but when they began to come off, Don Bardshar spent two months in the summer of 1980 re-roofing the barn by hand.
NO EASY JOB:
"I used a chicken ladder and 102 sheets of tin up to cover the roof," Don Bardshar says. "This required carrying two 14-foot pieces and a three-foot piece of tin to cover it from the high peak to the bottom. I carried them up, one piece at a time, and screwed them in with two-and-a-half inch screws."