The old barn 181001

      The old barn in the picture below had a cabin on the east side that was perhaps 100 or more years old. Looking at the picture, on the left side is the one room cabin. Someone lived in that cabin at one time, years ago before the people I bought the place from. It was about 8 by 6 feet and there was an old wood stove in there and there were shelves for canned goods, and space for a bunk-sized bed and it had a plaster ceiling. There was originally a brick chimney to vent the wood stove. The post you see on the left had a concrete fill in the hole and a date 1934 when the first electric wire came in as part of the rural electrification program during the great depression. The single wire fuse box was still on the wall. The door you can see was 1 of 3 doors on the little cabin. the 2nd door went out the back side and the 3rd went into the barn which had been added at a later time. Every time I was in that cabin I could feel the presence of whomever once lived in there. The barn was added when cattle were brought to the place. When I bought the place in 1989 the cabin and barn were packed with old junk to the point I could weave my way into the barn, but not even turn around. It was a huge job to remove everything. There were several old outbuildings around the place. In short it was a mess. The old barn was set on flat rocks, no foundation at all. I had already knocked out parts of the old. rotten wood on the barn.

      In the second picture I had knocked out the whole side of the barn and wondered how it was still standing on the 2 sticks I had on the far end of that side. The roof with its rafters and the galvanized roofing was pretty heavy. The beautiful vine was silver lace which I had planted.

      The next picture is after I removed the galvanized roofing and the 2 sticks on the back corner.

      The next picture is obvious that most of the rafters had been removed except for a few I used to hold the south side of the roof up.

      Once I removed those few rafters, the south side of the barn collapsed and it was time to remove the galvanized roofing from that side. You can see that 3rd doorway on the cabin.

      This picture was after I had hooked a log chain to my truck and pulled to old cabin mostly to the ground.

      The last picture is the north and east side of the cabin after I used the log chain to pull it down. That's the end of the pictures, but the rest of the story is below.

      I removed the rest of the roofing and had the skeleton of cabin on the ground. The lumber was all dry rotted so it was time to start burning the remains. The lumber from the barn roof in back was not as old as the cabin and as it burned I could easily keep ahead of things and keep it away from the old cabin during the 2 days it took to cremate them.
      After all the rafters on the barn were burned I was down to just the cabin to burn. I had run an underground cable out to the barn years earlier and had lifted from the ground and had it draped some 20 feet away and hooked up an old clock radio on another post there and had the radio playing when I went to start burning the remains of the cabin. I was too tired to break down the cabin like I had done with the barn, so I just set a match to it. I was stunned at the result! The old wood formed a perfect chimney and it was so dried and rotten it burned like paper. The fire turned into an inferno! It was so hot I had to move 30 feet away just to avoid skin burns. And then things got worse. The post you see in the first 3 pictures caught fire just 8 feet away and the post 20 feet away caught fire and I ran for the garden hose to put out the fires on the 2 posts and had to just watch my old alarm clock (all plastic around the circuit board inside) slowly melt away from the intense heat. It was surprising how long it continued melting before it finally quit working. The elm trees 20 feet away looked like there was tornado winds causing their branches to flit and fly about. I hoped and prayed they would not light on fire, had they lit up, there was no telling how far the fire would have spread. The leaves did turn brown, but did not catch fire. All in all it was a most exhilarating experience, only because the trees and the house and the woods nearby did not burn down with it.