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 reerected it in the bustling metropolis of Tokyo, Japan.


For the first leg of its journey, the barn was transported 2000 miles by truck to our shop in Waco, Texas. The entire frame was completely cleaned, restored, and fumigated. It was then loaded into two overseas shipping containers for the trip to Japan.


From Waco, the containers were sent by truck and loaded on a freight train for the 1500 mile trip to Los Angeles. In the port of Los Angeles, the barn was loaded onto a huge overseas barge for the 5500 mile, three week trip to Japan.


Once unloaded in Japan, the barn was loaded for the last time on a truck and delivered to its new home in Tokyo.


Four men from Heritage Restorations made the 17 hour flight to Tokyo to direct the barn raising. Working alongside our new found Japanese friends, the barn was reerected in a single day.


As craftsmen have done for centuries after completing a well crafted piece of work, everyone signed their names on the barns large swing beam.


If you could travel back in time and attempt to explain to the early American farmer who built this barn that in 150 years the barn would be transported from the little hamlet of Glen, New York to Waco, Texas, to Los Angeles, California and half way around the world to be raised in Japan, he’d have thought you were off your rocker! You could then tell him that the men who did the work flew through the air across the ocean to do it!


The completed barn is now used as a community center, and will be used as a model to show to other prospective Japanese customers who may also want …a piece of American History in the Far East.

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?

Old World Meets New

February 2, 2023
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.

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.

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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