by David Flint
David Stocks, President of the Shaker Museum | Mt. Lebanon, gave an update on Monday evening to members and guests of the Stephentown Historical Society on what is happening with the Great Stone Barn project. This architectural and agricultural wonder, Stocks said, was built in 1860 for the North Family of the Mount Lebanon Shakers. Planned by North Family Elder Frederick Evans and designed by Brother George Wickersham of the Church Family, it incorporated the latest ideas in New England mill design and scientific agriculture technology.
[private]The Shakers saw as their mission the engineering of a perfect society. The Shaker village would strive to be “Heaven on earth.” The construction of the perfect barn was in keeping with that mission. But the North Family, being charged with recruitment of converts, the Great Stone Barn, along with the Great Meeting House, was also intended to be huge, technologically advanced and to attract visitors and potential converts.
The barn was indeed huge – 200 feet long, 50 feet wide, five stories tall. Not just a warehouse, it was an agricultural factory. Built into a hillside, hay wagons entered the top floor called the driving floor at the east end. The hay was pitched down to the feeding floor where it was chopped and mixed with grain and then sent down chutes to iron feeders for the cows below on the stable floor. An innovative manure railway behind the cow stanchions transported manure to the west end of the building where it was dumped down to a composting vault on the floor below. In keeping with Shaker principles and with those of Frederick Evans himself, who, according to Stocks, was “a cleanliness freak,” it was a perfect system of cleanliness. The manure was mixed and composted with muck from the Shaker Swamp. The vault was sealed off from the rest of the barn and from the outside, reducing odors. The carefully tended composted material was then spread on the fields in the spring.
The original barn, Stocks said, had a flat roof with a raised central structure, or clerestory, designed to admit light and air. Apparently the flat roof covered with tar paper and gravel leaked, so 20 years later the roof was replaced with a slate covered gable roof with a high pitch. A two story cupola in the center provided ventilation.
Many residents of New Lebanon and Stephentown can remember the colossal fire in 1972 that destroyed the roof and gutted the interior of the barn. Steel braces were installed on the south side of the barn in 1984 to keep the walls from buckling, but 40 years of being open to the weather has seriously weakened the structure. Stocks said that in 2004, when the Shaker Museum assumed ownership of the property, the barn was in such an advanced state of decay “that it was really just a storm away from complete collapse.”
Along with very successful efforts to restore other buildings at the North Family site, the Shaker Museum set out to raise funds also to stabilize the Great Stone Barn. Four major grants have been received along with substantial donations from 100 individual supporters toward a two million dollar budget for the project. Stocks said there is need to raise another $100,000, but the stabilization began last year and is well under way with a completion date expected sometime this summer. The architect is Jan Hird Pokorny Associates of New York City, a firm focussing on historic preservation work on landmark buildings. Robert Silman Associates are providing the structural engineering expertise.
There are four parts to the project – disassembling and rebuilding the tops of the perimeter walls, repointing of areas on the exterior wall surfaces, injection grouting of the interior walls with 300,000 pounds of specialized liquid grout and structural reinforcement of the west wall with wooden cribbing and some steel bracing. Stocks said that the building won’t look that much different when the stabilization project is complete but at least the structure won’t fall down. In the next round of funding, he said, it is planned to install lead flashing and capping on the top of the walls.
There are no plans to restore the barn to its original condition. The Museum Board is now just beginning to talk about options for use of the stabilized space. In 2002 a tentative plan was developed to put a 50,000 square foot modern museum inside the shell of the barn. That plan was discarded when projected costs ballooned to 50 million dollars. Stocks cited the example of the Mill City Museum in Minneapolis as a possible model for a more feasible use. Mill City left the ruin of an 1874 flour mill as a monumental outdoor space which is now used for various programs. Stocks said the Shaker Museum might decide to build some exhibit space on the east side, perhaps replacing one or more of the three sheds that originally extended out on that side. “Whatever we do,” he said, “we have to please the North Family elders.”[/private]