The Glen Barn

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 town of Glen is located in the Mohawk Valley of New York, a historic region that in the 1700’s witnessed many of the major battles of the French and Indian War and Revolutionary War. Barns built at the time of the Revolution were typically under 1,000 square feet, measuring 26 feet wide by 36 feet long. But with the coming of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800’s, barn sizes grew larger and larger as improved machines for harvesting grain and hay were invented. This process reached its peak about 1870 when the largest wooden barns ever built, like the Glen Barn, were erected with eight times the volume of those earlier barns.


The Glen Barn is also unique for its method of construction and length of its timbers. The process used to build the barn is called “timber framing”, an ancient method of building that uses hand-cut mortise and tenon joints to hold the framework of the barn together without any metal fasteners, as opposed to the modern steel fasteners used today. The Glen Barn has massive timbers up to forty feet long that span its full width. The species of wood used in the framing is also unique. It is Hemlock wood, a conifer that was once a dominant species of tree in the American forest, but was decimated by loggers in the 1800’s. Surprisingly, hemlock trees were not cut for their lumber, but rather for their bark, which is high in tannic acid. This acid was used in the tanning process by which raw hides were turned into fine leather for boots, shoes and all types of leather goods. The loggers at that time would clear-cut the hemlock forests of the Northeast and only peal the bark off the felled hemlock trees, leaving behind masses of pealed logs. A prosperous tanning industry grew up in the region and shipped its finished leather goods around the world. An after-effect of this logging was that farmers had a free supply of ready-cleared land and long, virgin timbers with which to build their enormous barns.


This occurred just at the time when this region of New York became the gateway to the American Midwest with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which passed just a few miles from the Glen Barn and linked the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. This improved transportation provided by the canal allowed goods and farm produce, especially grains like corn and wheat, to be transported economically for the first time from the rich Midwest farms to the East Coast port of New York City and from there around the world. Prior to the opening of the canal, it cost 80 cents per bushel to ship corn to the East. In the year after the canal opened, this price dropped to 5 cents. This Transportation Revolution led farmers, who had previously grown a diversity of crops, to instead begin to specialize with single crops. The Glen Barn was built about 1870 in response to this market change. It was designed and built as a hay and dairy barn to provide milk products like cheese to a distant market. After over a century of service, the Glen Barn came to stand idle as those market changes, which once made it an innovative barn for its day, now moved on to make it obsolete. Modern dairies now house their cows in low metal buildings that cannot compare in craftsmanship or grandeur to the all-wooden Glen Barn. This year, the craftsmen of Heritage Restorations, based in Waco, Texas, carefully dismantled the Glen Barn, shipped it to Texas where it was cleaned and restored, and re-erected it in Kendalia, where it has now begun its second life far from the Mohawk Valley, but appreciated just as much as those earlier settlers did who built it nearly one hundred and fifty years ago.

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.

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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