Part 3 - Opening up Doors

Near the corner where the two sections of the barn meet, there is a door opening leading out into what is now the watering yard. While the door that has been hung in that opening is clearly of relatively recent vintage, there are plenty of indications that there was originally a door in that location.

Photo by Tevis Stites-Robertson

Photo of post with notches indicating an original Dutch door that has been covered with German Novelty siding in the 20th century.

There are notches cut into the column and jamb on either side of this opening to allow for battens, and their size and spacing indicate that it was originally a Dutch door. The door was originally hung on pintles, like the haymow door above it, and the pintle holes are clearly visible in the column. When we removed some soil we found two old hand-forged pintles near this location that likely supported the original door.

What was not known prior to the restoration is that there was originally another door at the ground level directly below the other mow door. There is an opening, on the other side of the column that this other door was hung from, for a door that was most likely added in the 1940s to provide an access to the milk house addition to the barn. The opening for the original door was sided over on the outside, and was sheathed over on the inside as well. It was not until we removed the siding from that section of wall that we discovered this original door opening. The siding covering the outside of the door opening is the German Novelty siding that was put on the barn at the time of the corner fill-in in the mid to late 1920s, telling us that this opening has not been used since that time. On the inside, this west wall is sheathed with a mixture of different boards. Some boards show circular saw marks and are nailed up with wire nails; they are clearly not original to the barn. There are other boards, however, that were sawn in a vertical mill and, while many of them have modern wire nails in them, some still have cut nails in them and would appear to have been nailed up at an early date. Given farmers' propensity towards reusing materials, both lumber and nails, it is certainly possible that these boards were recycled from somewhere else and are not original to the barn. There is a break in the older interior sheathing on the door jamb stud of the door that was sided over in the 20s, indicating that the interior sheathing predates the mid 1920s, having been put on when that door was still being used.

Restored doorway with original post on the left (shown in the photo above).

One question in the 1983 Historic Structures Report is about what openings, if any, were originally in the East wall of the horse barn. That document concluded that there were originally none. I disagree. There were none at the ground level, but there were three mow doors.

East wall of the Horse Barn showing the framing for the three doors at the mow level. The middle door had been covered over and only revealed during restoration.

Before restoration there were two mow doors in the east wall. Neither door was original, though both openings are. There was originally a third door between them. All three were roughly of the same dimensions. These openings are framed with the original materials, and the stud and post on either side of each opening show notches chiseled out for the battens. There are pintle holes in the posts, indicating that they were hinged on that side. There is no sign of the middle door from the outside, so we know that it was sided over when the novelty siding was put up to replace the original siding in the 1920s.

This photo taken before the restoration began shows just the two doors in the mow level and the middle door covered over with German Novelty siding from the 1920s.

Part I - Intro | Part 2 - Unearthing the Past | Part 4 - Our Barn's a New Yorker?
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