More of the old barns we saw on our way home from Tennessee. I posted
part I the other day. My granddaughter and I passed our time looking for old barns and water towers. I snapped these pictures as we drove by.
Seeing old barns makes me think of barn raisings and barn dances. I stayed summers on my grandparents farm, a homestead that had been in the family since 1867, and heard stories of my grandpa playing the fiddle at barn dances and heard tell of barn raisings where all the relatives and friends pitched in to build a barn in basically a day. (I have a few newspaper articles about those notable events too.) Those days of community spirit are long gone and so is the old family homestead. I didn't live during those times yet I seem to always feel a longing for them.
Barn Raisings-
- from Wickipedia
In earlier American rural life, communities raised barns because many hands were required. In areas that were sparsely settled or on the edge of the frontier, it was not possible to hire carpenters or other tradesmen to build a barn.
Barn raisings occurred in a social framework with a good deal of interdependence. Members of rural communities often shared family bonds going back generations. They traded with each other, buying and selling land, labor, seed, cattle, and the like. They worshipped together. They celebrated together, because cities were too far away to visit with any frequency on horseback. Despite traditions of independence, self-sufficiency, and refusal to incur debt to one another, community barn raisings were a part one's life.
