If I ask you to conger up an image of an old country barn and if you have a colorful imagination but have never lived on a farm, you would probably bring forth the image of a large, impressive building painted red with white trim and with a hayloft (or as it was once called, a mow, rhymes with cow) on the second floor and a huge maw (rhymes with law) of an opening at the front of the structure to receive hay bales.

A mow with a maw (rhymes with a cow with a law).

That red barn with the white trim is the idealized image, but frankly you won’t find many of them. And for sure you weren’t likely to find any in rural southwest Missouri in the middle of the 20th century. Not where I grew up. Mostly, they just never got painted. Maybe when they were first built they were sealed to help prevent rot, but they weren’t painted because paint was just too expensive.

The one on the Old Hyde Place had probably been built in the 1920s or a little earlier, and it was probably built primarily as a milk and feed barn. And by the time we arrived on the farm in the late 1940s it was weathered gray by sun and rain and looked more like a relic than a functional part of an active farm.

But it still was practical and functional — both as a shelter on occasion for cattle where they could be fed, and certainly for milking.

The lumber in the feeding stalls were oak — old and fully aged by the time we arrived. This was before the milling of wood became standardized, and a 2×4 became a 1 1/2 x 3 1/2. It is still called a 2×4 today, but that’s just for easy reference; it actually hasn’t been milled to those dimensions since 1961 when all lumber in the US began to be milled to consistent sizes.

The lumber in our barn was all milled to the nominal sizes — 2x4s, 2x6s, 2x8s and even 2x12s. And the lumber was all hardwood — hickory or oak mostly. There was a lot of lumber in the barn with milking stalls, feeding stalls, holding stalls, and storage areas, along with the barn’s framework that included poles for the exterior studding, 10- to 30-foot runs of joists for the loft floors, the loft flooring itself, and the exterior siding.

Salvaging and saving the wood would provide us with enough lumber for several other projects. Waste not, want not.

In the middle of the barn, where the cows were brought in for milking, what had probably been dirt floors had been replaced with concrete floors and a trough of the same material running through it. The trough was exactly at the point where a cow’s back quarters would be while her head was anchored in a stanchion.

The geometry of this was such that the almost certain occurrence of a bathroom break during milking could be easily contained in the trough and cleaned up when the milking was done.

We always had one or two milk cows on the farm. We didn’t use the milk ourselves; we sold it. From the time I was big enough and strong enough to do so, it was my job to get the cows to the barn twice a day, get their heads locked in the stalls, and milk them.

The process, as I recall, was like this: Once you put Mrs. Cow’s head in the stanchion — where you already had put some feed to attract and hopefully keep her attention — you grabbed a T-shaped, short stool, and a milk bucket, put the stool under your butt, the bucket under the cow’s udder, your head up against the cow’s side to let her know you were there, and proceeded with the rhythmic process of extracting the milk.

If a bathroom break became imminent, you got a little warning because Mrs. Cow would start to spread her back legs. There was no stopping the process once that started, and it would proceed with alacrity. All you could do was grab the bucket, grab the stool and jump out of the way.

You were always attentive to the leg-spreading early warning system.

***

The milking stations in our barn ran through the middle of the structure. To the left of the area were holding and feeding stalls for only a few head of cattle. To the right was a storage area for equipment, including two sets of harnesses for mules Dad used before we acquired a tractor to cultivate the few tillable acres we had on the farm.

At some point when Dad was able to afford a tractor, he purchased a used John Deere B model with a fly wheel on the side that you had to spin aggressively to fire and start the engine. I considered it a mark of passage when I was finally tall enough and strong enough to spin the wheel (no easy feat) and get the tractor going.

You had to be careful doing this because the fly wheel was on the side of the tractor body between it and the large left wheel of the tractor itself. This put you in harm’s way if you didn’t make sure the transmission was in neutral when you yanked the fly wheel around and the engine fired. In which event, the whole tractor would buck forward and knock you into tomorrow afternoon.

So, the last thing you did before giving a big yank was to wiggle the gear shift stick about 15 or 20 times — and then one more — to make sure the tractor was in neutral. It never bucked on me, but I never wanted it to either.

***

The hayloft seemed massive. The floor was the ceiling of the milking stations and the equipment storage area below and was covered with 1×6 planks nailed to the very sturdy joists that ran across the structure from side to side.

The joists also ran on across the top of the feeding stations, but there was never a floor laid down over this area. We always had both hay bales and loose hay in the loft, and we would use pitch forks to throw straw or loose hay down into the feeding stations through the open joists. Or we threw bales of hay out through the big opening at the front of the loft to bust open and put in the outdoor feeding stales in the barn yard.

A wooden fence — also sun-blanched gray — ran from along side a ground-floor door of the barn itself, across the barn yard to what was likely a 10-foot by 10-foot chicken coop, where also every day I had to gather eggs. We had about a dozen chickens most of the time, so they could produce a fair amount of eggs in a week and we sold what we didn’t use of those.

And on occasion, my mother — my gentle mother — would come down to the barn yard, grab a chicken by a leg, put her hand around the chicken’s neck, and proceed to “wring” it.

I know its sounds like a cruel process and even more cruel of me to describe how the recently decapitated chicken would run around the yard for a few lingering minutes like — well, like a chicken with its head cut off.

When it finished its dance, it would become the evening meal.

The roof of the barn was tall to provide as much space as possible inside the loft area for hay and was covered with three-foot by a five-foot corrugated tin sheets. Over time, these sheets would become rusted on the surface and turn a weathered red that somehow complimented the weathered gray of the barn itself. All this rendered the gray barn with it’s tin and rusting roof a wonderful subject for photographers, but it wasn’t the mark of a well-kept farm.

The pitch of the roof and the slick nature of the tin made walking on the roof treacherous. And in the hot Missouri summer, the roof could become almost too hot to touch. Being on it for any length of time wasn’t a job one would volunteer for, which is probably the reason the roofs were frequently neglected and in need of repair.

At some point soon after purchase of the John Deere, Dad decided to put an addition on at the back of the barn to garage the tractor. It was another pole structure, roughly 15 to 20 feet high and 15 or so feet wide. The poles that anchored the addition had been set in the ground with concrete, lashed together horizontally with 2×6 cross pieces and 1×6 wooden siding nailed to the cross pieces.

There was a large opening for the tractor to pass in but no door on the opening. And the roof had the same corrugated and rusting tin as the barn. This addition, although new, added what looked like a throbbing sore thumb to what already was the very image of a dysfunctional farm structure.

***

I tell you all this, so you can understand how I felt on the first day of my summer vacation after my freshman year in high school when my Dad announced that my summer project was to tear the barn down.

Take it to the ground and salvage as much of the lumber as possible.

I was knocked off my center. This was not how I had planned to spend my summer freedom. So there I was on a beautiful early summer morning, standing in the barnyard and wondering how you go about tearing down a barn.

The obvious — and really the only — answer was from the top down. But I knew that was going to be treacherous and probably dangerous. At the peak of the barn, I would likely be 30 feet from the ground. I had to find a way to make it less dangerous.

I needed a plan. And a ladder that was very portable. And just a couple of tools to carry up high on a slick, hot, and steep surface. And a system for getting the tin sheets loose and then off the barn to the ground.

Things were coming together in my head.

The metal sheets were nailed into the ceiling rafters, so I knew where the nails were. I could see the nail heads. I cut some 2x4s long enough to stretch across two rafters and nailed them in…but didn’t drive the nails fully in so when I was ready they could be removed as needed to reposition the boards as I made my way down the roof pulling nails as I went. I used these boards to put my feet against and secure my position on the roof.

This would be my portable ladder.

When I had a tin sheet fully loose from its mooring, I would move it to the edge of the roof and drop it to the ground. This was a slow and tedious job and took more than a short spell just to get the roof of the barn uncovered.

But with that done, I finally could stand — almost always — on firm flooring or floor joists. My legs were pretty rubbery by the time I was off the roof and inside the barn. But my mind was steady now and my resolve high.

The balance of the summer was spent moving from the rafters, to the joists for the loft, to the interior stalls, to the siding, and finally to bringing down the poles that held up the tractor garage at the back of the barn.

Amazingly, I never had a major accident. I did step on a nail at some point, driving it deep into my foot. Mom and Dad had me get a tetanus shot because we couldn’t remember when I had had my last one…sort of standard medical fair for the times.

By tearing the barn down, I learned a lot about putting one up. I learned a lot about carpentry. Those old barns were built to last until the wood rotted away and the nails just fell to the ground. And the lumber from that structure was as strong and usable as it was when the barn was first constructed.

To this day, I can still hear the lumber squeal as the long 16-penny nails were pulled away. If we hadn’t torn that old thing down, it might have stayed standing another 30 years or more.

It was an adventure, the summer of 1960. I also learned a lot that summer about me, and that probably was what Dad had in mind when he put the project in my hands. I gained a lot of confidence in what I could accomplish even when I didn’t know what I was doing. Looking back, I don’t think I was ever the same after that.

I wasn’t an adult yet. But I wasn’t still just a kid either.

***

That was also my last summer of solitude and isolation on the old Hyde place. I turned 16 the next year and got my driver’s license. Like the new bicycle on my tenth birthday had done, the license to drive on my sixteenth birthday opened the door to new worlds even wider for the farm boy who had been confined to the 20 acres of the old Hyde place.

As it turned out, tearing down the barn in the summer of 1960 was the last major undertaking for me on the farm. It would be a number of years before I realized just how important the fulfilling of that assignment was in my personal growth.

It became a schooling in problem-solving. There weren’t any plans — or YouTube videos — on How to Tear Down an Old Gray Barn and very little guidance came from Dad; everything had to be created as I went along and every problem had to be solved on the fly.

It was left to me to get it done. And that — the exercise itself — served me well for the rest of my life as a process of analysis, planning and execution in problem solving. As an adult, I don’t think I ever ran across a problem so big that it couldn’t be divided into smaller tasks and then resolved one task at a time.

Of course, there would come a time when I became a father of four kids that I wondered where I could find a barn for each of them to tear down.

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