Antique Barns for Sale - Carolina Timberworks

Sadly, the age of antique barns is drawing to a close. Time, the elements, and neglect are hard on old barns. There are lots of old barns for sale, but most aren’t worth saving.

We happen to have not one, but two, antique timber frame barns in inventory that we thought were worth buying.

But before we show them to you, a few years ago, Tedd Benson began his talk to a group of timber framers with the following words:

Barns resonate.
Tedd benson

Why?

Sure, there’s the honest form and exposed structure.

But just maybe, buried somewhere deep in our DNA, we remember our ancestors building the great European timber framed medieval cathedrals.

Timber Frame Cathedral — Engraved illustrations of Cologne Cathedral; Medieval Architecture from Iconographic Encyclopedia of Science, Literature and Art, Published in 1851.

It doesn’t seem too great a leap to assume that some of our ancestors who built the great halls and cathedrals of the Middle Ages would also be charged with constructing the other great buildings of the era (barns).

Perhaps then, it’s not surprising to note how both the size and aisles of barns evoke the space and shape of a cathedral:

Cathedral barns: The barn at Harmondsworth is almost 600 years old, is one of the largest ever known to have been built in Britain (37 feet 6 in wide by 192 feet), and was used mainly to store crops before threshing.

Fast forward a few hundred years, and it makes sense that immigrants to the United States would bring those skills to bear on the barns (and houses) they built on the shores and prairies of a new land.

Old fashioned barn raising — Cathedrals on the Prairie.

With their wide-open spaces, soaring ceilings and weathered wood, antique post-and-beam barns of centuries past are being reborn.
The Wall Street Journal

So what are people doing with these old barns?

Barn projects, like their owners, vary widely…

Wedding and event venue barns

wedding venue barn — Our friends Kristin & Kara located a 90 year old timber-framed bank barn which we helped them disassemble, engineer, repair, move, and re-erect on a different property as a wedding venue. Here we are putting it back to work for another hundred years as Cana Barn, a wedding venue in Staunton, Virginia.

Cana Barn interior — Open plan barns work nicely for event venues.

Party Barns

Barn Conversions

Antique barns for sale:

All the beautiful projects above began life as an old barns just like these two antique barns for sale (both are stored disassembled and in the dry):

There’s a certain logic to the idea that the best barns were built on the most fertile land–the idea being that these farmers were the most successful financially, and therefore had the means to build unusually nice barns (usually timber framed as opposed to nailed or bolted together).

Accordingly, here are two antique barns built on fertile Ohio farmland: