RETURN TRIP Even with all of the countless nostalgia magazines and papers now appearing on news stands and make positive favoring a return of our national culture base we seldom see any more photographs or at work showing letters from readers and correspondent asking what has become become of them. To many Americans the "barns" early settler's built to store their native-grown wealth in whatever particular phase of the burgeoning economy they chose to compete.
More and more barn were built when we were a growing nation barns of many styles of many of occupationally specialized barns were built in just about every section of the nation. They were often symbolic of how the world was to be led to see the success an individual seemed to have made of his holdings. The number and size of barns a man could afford to build told the world of that time who had the money in- hand and was willing to spend it to enhance his social standing. That's one way in which the barns have become such fine story-tellers describing how human lives were both helped and harmed over many years...living, loose-ends poorly tied, and entire dreams of large family groups - men, women and children - entire generations
- forever destroyed.
Very often, today you can learn a great deal more about how a man lived by visiting his barns rather than his house. The home environment reflected some of elements and sentiments of other members of farm family of those days. It was larger, more comprehensive group than we might find it to be today although that, too, can be fantasized in even more colorful ways today.
The one barn with which I have had a close relationship was a more practical one as was the family farm on which it was located. The barn was, to me, of the finest types of such structures in this Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. It had both English and Germanic features in it, as did the family who lived in the nearby, native-made brick brick home nearby. It could have been said the barn had "just grow'd" there - like Lil' Eva in"Uncle Tom's Cabin". It was built of coherent pieces over years of dreaming and planning and the total cost - a remarkably styled bridge barn a dream realized by farmer Irving Driver when he was just a lad. I have the paper on which he liked the total cost of materials and of labor hired at less than five hundred dollars. I might have been a good thing that he died before the boom of the wreaking rig took it away from us - the old 1844-'45 brick house, as well, to make room for the housing development in which we, as some of his descendent's, now live.
It's foolish, some people would tell you, to waste your time even thinking about a building which is no longer in existence. That barn on I. D. Driver's old "Lofton Farm" just west of Weyers Cave, Virginia, on the historic Keezletown Pike, was a dream a young farm boy brought to practical perfection in his own lifetime.
What kind of structure are you building today in which you might plan to store your accomplishments and achievements for others who follow you? Yes, and for those who will stand in their shoes! Those buildings we used to call barns are disappearing fast these days; getting more and more scarce. Where and how are you saving the good things of your life? There are far more of them, too, than you have thought there could be. Build big. Build to preserve such wealth for others, not to brag about having it.
Andrew McCaskey Sr amccsr@comcast.net 2-17-07 [c628wds]
