Old World Meets New

February 2, 2023
Big Beam

More than any other factor, what differentiated American timber framing from its predecessors in the Old World was when the Old World pioneers came to America, they were confronted with a very different building reality in that the materials they had on hand to build with, namely trees, were vastly different from their experience in Europe. By the 1600’s many European countries like England, Ireland and Holland had been deforested. And though there was a tradition of timber framing, they had by this time, very poor quality trees to work with. For this reason they employed even the short and unstable crooks of trees in their buildings, a practice that became unnecessary in the New World.


Where had all the mighty English oaks gone to create this shortage of timber? Literally, up in smoke. This was before the age of coal-burning and wood was used for heating and cooking, as well as home building and wooden shipbuilding.


In our years of restoring historic timber framed barns, this hand hewn hemlock timber is the largest we have ever seen. It is part of a barn built in the Mohawk Valley of New York state circa 1840. The timber is 35 feet long and measures 13″ thick by 28″ at the widest point. That’s well over 900 board feet of lumber in a single beam.


After over 165 years of natural air drying, this beam weighs around a ton. When it was first cut green using only simple hand tools and transported with horses, it likely weighed over 3500 pounds!


Counting the tightly spaced growth rings, we determined that the tree from which this timber was hewn was around 300 years old when the early American farmer cut it to build his barn. It was a towering 100-year-old hemlock when the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth harbor in 1620.

Through THeir Eyes

Can you imagine the awe these settlers to the New World felt when they arrived and saw the virgin American forest? They were probably stunned . . . and intimidated. The New World forest contained straight trees over one hundred feet tall: pines, hemlocks, oaks, chestnut (which was said to have made up one third of the northern forest), maples and beech, just to mention a few of the species. And sometimes this difference between New and Old World trees had deadly consequences. The first permanent settler to Bergen County in Northern New Jersey in 1670,

David Demarest, lost his namesake and oldest son to a falling tree soon after they arrived. The Demarests had immigrated first to New York from the low country of Holland and prior to that were persecuted Huguenots in France. They had probably never encountered a forest when they began to build their homes and barns on the bank of the Hackensack River.


So here in America converged a unique combination: skilled European wood craftsmen and an untouched, virgin forest. And when the two were combined, they produced for a period of time, the finest and largest barns ever built in the world, during what we might call the “Golden Age of Barns,” before the Eastern forest was clear cut to make way for agriculture and industry, and the Industrial Revolution brought an end to the art of timber framing in America.

The Glen Barn

By Kevin Durkin • February 2, 2023
Built c. 1870, the Glen barn is one of the largest barns ever built in New York State measuring forty feet wide by one hundred feet long. Heritage Restorations has restored over 200 barns from New York, and it is the largest barn that they have ever moved and rebuilt. The history of the Glen barn is a reflection of the great cultural changes that took place during the 1800’s in America.

The Barn Melting Pot

By Kevin Durkin • February 2, 2023
I am often asked the question of where we get our barns. When I reply, “Mostly from New York,” I am then asked, aren’t there good barns in other states?

A Heritage Barn Story

February 2, 2023
In the fall of 1609, English explorer Henry Hudson sailed up the river that would later bear his name. He was in search of a westward passage to Asia, but as the water sweetened and became less salty, it became clear to them that this was not the passage they were seeking. It was fine land though, and he claimed it for his patrons, The Dutch West India Company.

Hand Crafted Water Wheel

February 2, 2023
In late 2012 a private golf course near Houston, Texas was in the process of a facility expansion including a new 9 hole-par three surrounding a small lake. The Owner, a creative visionary, imagined this required industrial pump-house building could be a feature rather than a distraction to the otherwise pristine short course.

Barn Raising in Japan

February 2, 2023
Heritage Restorations had the unique opportunity to raise one of our restored historic timber frames in Japan! We dismantled and restored an 1840’s timber frame barn from the tranquil fields of upstate New York and re-erected it in the bustling metropolis of Tokyo, Japan.

The Great Epizootic of 1872

By Kevin Durkin • January 5, 2013
People often ask what interesting things we find in the centuries-old barns we dismantle for our barn restoration business. Well, there are a lot of interesting “things,” like the time we found an old pillowcase hidden in a corner of the first barn that we took down that was full of jewelry from a long-forgotten house burglary, and the time we found the bowling ball that my helper claims is the ball that old Rip Van Winkle used before he drank the potion that put him to sleep for twenty years in the Catskill Mountains.

Mott Gristmill

By Kevin Durkin • January 5, 2013
There is something about gristmills and waterwheels that resonates with just about everyone. The gristmill is an American icon that evokes sentiments of home and community, as is evidenced in the gristmill pictures so many of us have in our homes.

Colonel Drake Saves the Whales

By Kevin Durkin • August 25, 2012
From time to time, in my travels in the Northeast, I pass through the sleepy hamlet of Greenville, New York—just another rural American village on the landscape of formerly thriving agricultural communities. Over the last eighty years, such communities have undergone a relentless depopulating, as generations of young people abandoned their agrarian roots and made their ways to urban centers that offered more “economic opportunity.”

LaRue Barn

By Kevin Durkin • August 25, 2012
We found the LaRue barn through a phone call from a woman in northern New Jersey who had heard about our work of moving and restoring barns. She wanted to know if we would possibly want to move an old barn that was in danger of being demolished to make way for a new suburban development.

Middleburg Palatine House

By Kevin Durkin • August 24, 2012
Adjacent to the LaRue barn1 you will find another timber-framed building that is actually an early American house. It was originally built about 1750 in the Schoharie Valley of New York state on a hillside above the Schoharie Creek. The left half measures twenty feet by twenty feet and is the original old house. The timber-framed addition on the right side was added about 1800.
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