Barns & Farms

You can identify most regions of the United States from the shape of a barn, because a barn is a machine designed around one crop and one climate.

The Pennsylvania bank barn is built into a hillside so that wagons can drive into the upper floor while livestock occupy the lower, with a forebay overhanging the south wall. New England barns are connected to the house through a series of sheds, so a farmer could reach the animals in February without going outside — the arrangement people call big house, little house, back house, barn. Midwestern dairy barns are tall with rounded or gambrel roofs to hold loose hay above the cows. Tobacco barns in Kentucky and Connecticut have hinged vertical siding that opens to let air through. Southern barns are smaller and more open, because the winter does not require otherwise.

None of that is decoration. Each shape is an answer to a particular question about weather, crop and animal.

The mail order catalog belongs in this subject as much as the barn does. Sears and Montgomery Ward sold farm families everything from harness to houses, and a farmstead photographed in 1915 may contain a windmill, a cream separator, a buggy and in some cases the house itself, all ordered from a book and delivered by rail.

The photographs come from several directions and the sources matter. Commercial photographers sold views to the families themselves — a farm portrait with everyone arranged in front of the house was a standard purchase, and the livestock and equipment were included deliberately because they were the point. Agricultural agencies photographed methods and machinery. And in the 1930s the Farm Security Administration photographed rural America at the worst moment in its history, producing the images most people now have in mind.

Those FSA pictures need reading carefully. They were made to build political support for New Deal programs, and the photographers were briefed on what to look for. That does not make them dishonest — the conditions were real — but it does mean they show a particular slice, and the prosperous farms of the same decade are underrepresented as a result.

The windmill and the silo are the two features that changed the look of the American farm most visibly. Steel windmills spread across the plains from the 1880s and made settlement possible on land with no surface water. Upright silos arrived at about the same time and let a dairy farm keep cattle through a northern winter on stored corn. Both appear in photographs as suddenly as they appeared on the land.

The equipment dates a photograph well. Horse-drawn reapers give way to binders, then to tractors from the 1910s, and the changeover took forty years. A farm with both a team and a tractor in the yard is somewhere between 1920 and 1945.

Barn raisings appear regularly and are worth understanding. A frame barn went up in a day with the whole neighborhood present, because no family could do it alone and because the labor was reciprocal. The photograph of forty men on a frame is documenting an economy as much as a building.

The Ships That Were Meant to Be Photographed