Barn-hopping

You'll find vintage cars, $40,000 clocks, renowned dancers - and maybe even a cow

By Lynda Morgenroth

Our rural New England landscape is unimaginable without barns. They are as essential to our idea of how New England looks as maple trees, stone walls, and lobster traps.

Shelburne Museum The Shelburne Museum in Vermont's Champlain Valley just south of Burlington is "a collection of collections," in the words of founder Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888-1960). [continued] Hancock Shaker Village The simple but majestic Round Barn at Hancock Shaker Village in the Berkshire hills outside of Pittsfield is the signature structure of this community of 20 restored buildings. [continued] Delaney Antique Clocks It is a pleasing experience, a kind of poetic symmetry, to shop for old objects in old buildings. [continued] Bungay Jar Some of the most blissful, romantic lodgings in New England are on working or former farms. [continued] Wingscorton Farm Inn Closer to home, you could idle away a few sea-breezy days at Wingscorton Farm Inn on the Cape. [continued] Jacob's Pillow If ever there were a charmed atmosphere, it exists at Jacob's Pillow, a dance-lover's Forest of Arden. [continued]

Barns are comforting, familiar, and yet also mysterious. All kinds of events go on inside: the birth, life, and death of animals, long hours of toil by farmers, and not a few trysts. Construction is rugged and bold. Windows are large to encourage ventilation and to let in lots of light. Practical features prevail, such as double pine sheathing to keep out snow and rain, and siting on hillsides to allow walk-in access at all levels.

As you make your way this spring and summer, consider barns; those old and still in use, adapted for new activities, and those brand new. What follows is no exhaustive list, but a sampling of varied barns. They range in character from barn-museums to barn theaters to those offering rest for the romantic.

A barn bible

You may get the barn-bug, as historian Thomas Durant Visser did. He studied hundreds of rustic structures to compile the "Field Guide to New England Barns and Farm Buildings." The 200-page book is somewhat academic in approach, but is nevertheless packed with tasty, digestible, satisfying information about barns, silos, sugar houses, granaries, potato houses, ice houses, and outhouses. (Entries on the latter structures include advice by the 18th century farmer-author Samuel Deane to locate outhouses "in a clump of shrubbery, mostly evergreens.")

The barn-buildings Visser cites are generally not open to the public, but can be viewed from public roads. The field guide's lavish descriptions and photographs can help the drive-by barn lover recognize and appreciate what she is seeing - milk houses, ice houses, well houses, or wood sheds.

"Field Guide to New England Barns and Farm Buildings" University Press of New England, 1997. $19.95.

Lynda Morgenroth is a freelance writer.

Published in the Boston Globe Calendar's 1999 Wandering New England issue.