North American Barns
Pennsylvania Barns
D-L Design
D-L History
The Pennsylvania Barn stands as an excellent example of acculturation by incorporating the heritage of three nationalities - Swiss, German, and American, into one structure. Its many names - Sweitzer, Swisser, Overshoot, Porch, Forebay, and Bank barn reflect the mosiac of traditions that went into its design.
Origin
Throughout the 20th century, scholars have debated the true origins of the Pennsylvania barn. We can find the closest antecedents in the highlands of Upper Bavaria and in the southern part of the Black Forest Mountains in the Jura region of Switzerland. Photographs of this region published in Hermann Phleps's The Craft of Log Building portray early ancestors to the Pennsylvania barn as farmhouses - buildings that combined the family dwelling with the barn. Most structures illustrated in Phleps's Log Building depict a second and often a third level, a side-gabled roof, extended roof awnings, a length-ways entrance, and a cantilevered second floor - at times on all four sides of the building!
Another link to the Pennsylvania barn's Swiss origin is found in Alfred Shoemaker's Hex No!. Shoemaker quotes the Reverend Benjamin Bausman regarding his travels in Europe. "In Switzerland, we feel very much at home... one sees the original Swiss barns after which all our Pennsylvania Dutch [Deutsche] were patterned."
The most definitive study on our topic is The Pennsylvania Barn by Robert Ensminger (1992/2003). Ensminger, a native Pennsylvanian, grew up with these structures and spent years consultating with both academics and builders, and traveled overseas to find the roots of the Pennsylvania barn. Two major works that influenced Ensminger to create his own classification system of Pennsylvania barns are Charles H. Dornbusch's Pennsylvania German Barns (1958) and the Joseph Glass publication The Pennsylvania Culture Region: A view from the barn (1986). Below is an interpretation of the Dalziel Barn's history according to Ensminger's analysis and categorization of the Pennsylvania barn.
Through his travels in Europe, Ensminger found no forebay barn prototypes in Germany, only large, banked house/barns with forebay-like extension. But across Central and Eastern Switzerland and into Austria he found the true forebay bank barn, separate from the dwelling space. Prattigau, Switzerland, was the region where Ensminger found the most barns resembling the Pennsylvania barn style. A forebay barn in Conters, Prattigau, dating to 1564, tells us the Pennsylvania barn was established long before immigration to Pennsylvania started in the early 1700s.
As settlers arrived in North America, they brought the culture and heritage of their homeland. But the new frontier forced these pioneers to change their habits and adapt to their new surroundings. By the mid-18th century, Germans, Swedes, Finns, Dutch, and English populated Pennsylvania. The state was rich in building knowledge. The farmer could pick and choose what suited his needs and budget.
While there are many similarities between the Prattigau and the Pennsylvania barn, there are also many differences - most forebay barns were larger in America and therefore required different building techniques to accommodate the extra floor space. Farming practices also began to change in the eighteenth century. Farmers were moving from simple grain production to producing mixed grain and livestock. The simple ground barn was soon replaced by the versatile forebay bank barn.
Design
There are significant variations in the details regarding the design and construction of Pennsylvania barns - the barn evolved as agriculture changed and as new ideas immigrated to the country. But the Pennsylvania barn's fundamental identity - the forebay, remained the same.
The distinctive features of the Pennsylvania barn were fairly consistent during its evolution: it was always banked to provide access to the upper level for processing and storing grain; it contained several bays used as threshing floors and mows; the upper level floor extended south in a cantilever fashion over the stable wall below to provide a ventilated area for a granary on the upper level and protection from snow and rain for the animals on the south side of the barn at the lower level; the entrance/exit for the lower level (the front) faced south; when farmers learned that stabling and feeding cattle produced stock superior to cattle raised by the old pioneer practice of roaming they started to house livestock in the lower level of the barn.
As stated earlier, the forebay is the Pennsylvania barn's diagnostic feature. In 1958, Charles Dornbusch classified this and other characteristics of the Pennsylvania barn. Ensminger later developed a more comprehensive taxonomy, which we shall briefly examine below.
Class I: The Sweitzer Pennsylvania Barn, 1730-1850
The Sweitzer was a term used in the the early 1800s to identify this early forebay barn.
1.
The Sweitzer has a forebay depth of 6 to 9 feet, supported only by the cantilevered beams from the upper level floor.
2.
The front gabled roof slope is longer than the rear because the roof continues unbroken over the forebay.
3.
The roof angle is steep, approximately 45˚, to facilitate drainage, giving the characteristic asymmetrical roof. The earliest Sweitzer barns generally have the steepest roofs and lowest forebay front walls.
4. The forebay front wall is two-thirds that of the rear wall due to the longer front roof slope.
Class II: The Standard Pennsylvania Barn, 1790-1890
The Standard is the most widespread of Pennsylvania barn types. The main difference between this and the earlier Sweitzer barn is the use of symmetrical bents that include the forebay within the main barn frame - allowing the roof ridge to be centred over the barn. This provides symmetrical gable ends and a forebay front wall height equal to that of the rear (north side) wall.
Another difference lies in a more shallow forebay from that of the Sweitzer. Ensminger hypothesizes the growing scarcity of long, heavy timbers for unsupported forebays led to designs with shorter cantilever projections. A third aspect differentiating the Sweitzer from the Standard is the use of stone and brick. Standard barns have stone walls, usually at the gable ends.
Class III: The Extended Pennsylvania Barn, 1790-1920
This third class includes barns enlarged by amending or extending the barn beyond the basic Sweitzer or Standard framing. For the most part these alterations involve amending the forebay, extending the barn's ramp side, and vertically enlarging the barn by adding another level.
One thing common amongst all types of Pennsylvania barns was the use of hexagram symbols for decoration and spiritual belief. These "rosettes" or "morning stars" represented hope, love, and kindness and were seen throughout the Pennsylvania-Deutsch homestead painted on walls, stitched onto fabric, carved into wood, and printed onto paper.
Evolution
1790 to 1840 was the golden age of agriculture in Pennsylvania - commercial farming replaced the self-sufficient pioneer homestead. As more roads were built, multiple grains and livestock could be taken to market or mill. These roads connected the farmer to Philadelphia and the surrounding communities. Times were good for the farmer. The future was bright. Larger barns were built as a result of this optimism and to satisfy the expanding markets. The smaller Grundscheier was abandoned for the Sweitzer barn by the 19th-century. The Sweitzer and its variations fulfilled the needs of the farmer into the mid-20th century - until modern machines became too large to be housed on the drive floors. According to Ensminger, the earliest location for the forebay bank barn to appear was in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania - about 40 miles west of Philadelphia.
By 1790, soil nutrients were depleted due to generations of continuous grain farming in Pennsylvania. Agricultural societies began promoting soil conservation and crop rotation but farmers continued to see their crops shrink and looked to animal husbandry to make up for the decreasing profits. By the 1820s Pennsylvania was the centre of beef cattle grazing in America. The need to stable and feed animals in the winter became the stimulus for building larger barns. The first step towards increasing storage and stabling capacities was to make the barn longer. Another strategy was to add a third level. A third method was to add a front-shed extension to the forebay. This extension became necessary for feed storage - primarily for horses which, by 1840, became the primary source of motive power.
Changing agricultural practices alone do not explain the emergence of Ensminger's Standard Pennsylvania Barn. This symmetrical barn, with its shallow forebay, was also influenced by the English and their Georgian style of architecture, which emphasized symmetry, order, and balance. Using stone masonry is also credited to English origin. Stone masonry was expensive. To have a stone barn was a symbol of status and allowed the farmer to emerge from Germanic peasantry to successful businessman.
Earlier Sweitzer barns in Pennsylvania can be identified by bent construction - the tie beams were always fastened over the roof plate with a joint that locks into the end post. This type of joinery was European in origin and was used in barns throughout the eastern part of Pennsylvania from the earliest times of settlement until the late 19th-century. Later barns used the H-bent technology, where tie beams were connected to end posts below the roof plate. As Ensminger observes, English building traditions had their greatest influence on the timber framing of the Pennsylvania barn. Pennsylvania barns without this adopted timber frame strategy have the closest links to the Swiss design.
Posting of the forebay was common in Sweitzer barns in Switzerland but not among the early barns in Pennsylvania. Only after 1840 was this style adopted in the United States and Ensminger postulates this could also have been from English influence.
Outside Pennsylvania
Ensminger and fellow historian Joseph Glass state the most concentrated area of Pennsylvania barns to be in... you guessed it, Pennsylvania! There is a "barn core" which stretches south-west from Northhampton County, Pennsylvania, through Berks, Lancaster, and York counties, and then 15 miles south of the state border into Maryland. This patch, about 50 miles wide and 180 miles long, runs diagonally about 30 miles west of Philadelphia.
Beyond this core region lies a secondary domain of Pennsylvania barns stretching from New Jersey, south-west through Pennsylvania, across Maryland, and into Virginia. Beyond this domain are Pennsylvania barns reaching as far west as Nebraska, as far south as Tennessee, and as far north as Ontario, Canada. This diffusion of the forebay bank barn through middle America and into Canada was due to: 1 - road construction and immigration which allowed for the dissemination of ideas; and 2 - the need to diversify the farmer's markets led to building a barn that could produce grain and house animals all under one roof. The largest selection of Pennsylvania barns occurring outside the domain are found in Ohio. The early Sweitzer barns in Ohio most closely resemble our Schmidt-Dalziel barn.
Southern Ontario's landscape has a strong Pennsylvania German flavour - especially in the Kitchener-Waterloo district. Historian Peter Ennals mapped this area in 1972 and discovered the majority of barns to be of the Standard type - with symmetrical gables, posted forebays, and H-bent tie beams.
Now that you have a good understanding of what distinguishes a Pennsylvania barn, let's look at where those details appear in our Dalziel Barn.