There Used to Be a Barn Here

There’s a sweet, sentimental song by Frank Sinatra called “There Used To Be a Ballpark.” It’s a touching lament, remembering things from our youth that aren’t there anymore. Written by songwriter Joe Raposo, it evokes old ballparks no longer there. Think of the likes of Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds, Forbes Field.

Call me odd, but I have a similar sentimental attachment to old barns. Yes, barns. Maybe some of you reading this feel the same way.

I can’t quite put it into words, but I just love old barns. I was born in December 1966 in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, first lived in the Verona-Penn Hills area outside the city, moved to a small coal town called Russellton for a few years (with our Italian side of the family), and then grew up in suburban Butler, Pennsylvania. During my time in Butler, my dad bought a beautiful piece of property in the country. It covered about 15 acres. We were middle-class at best, with my dad working in the steel industry, but he somehow mustered enough savings and loan money to purchase “the farm” (as we called it) as an investment to sell a few years later. It was his plan to scrape up enough money to send his three kids to college. It worked.

In all, we lived on the farm only for about four years, but it seemed much longer. We loved it, and to this day all miss it and talk about it. There was the green acreage, the rolling hills, the corn stalks as far as the eye could see, that you could walk through for hours. The neighboring farmer grew popcorn, which we always nabbed a few ears of. There were the woods, the pond.

And of course, there was the barn.

I can’t quite explain it, but there’s something so unique, distinctive, and comforting about a barn for a kid. There’s the feel, the smell. There are the large entrance doors, big enough to swing or slide and drive a tractor through. There are the massive beams, the wooden floor, the lofts, the stalls for animals, bushel baskets, old machinery and tools, and of course, the hay.

Hay, hay, and more hay.

In the winter, when it’s cold outside, it’s warm in the barn because of the insulation of the hay that we cut, baled, and stacked. Ask anyone who’s a farmer or raises animals, and they will tell you about what a wonder hay is. It has an amazing ability to keep things warm. Forget about rocket science and the theory of relativity, whoever invented hay is a damned genius.

We had an old stray dog that we kids named “puppy.” He stayed outside. When it got near zero degrees, we tried to fetch “puppy” to bring him into the house. He didn’t want to go into the house. He buried himself in hay inside the barn. He was perfectly content.

We kids would hang out inside the barn with the dog, cats, and jump off the loft and beams into the hay. We would create mazes and “cabins” out of hay bales. There was a pulley we could ride. We would explore and play. Our friends and cousins who visited were likewise taken. They thought the barn was really cool.

We even took the unusual step of mounting a basketball rim and backboard on one of the beams and creating an indoor court that was the neatest thing. We put spotlights in the corners to illuminate the inside at night. We had our own indoor basketball court. During the brutally cold, snowy winter of 1979, I spent hours inside shooting hoops and throwing baseballs inside bushel baskets turned on their sides — strike zones to practice pitching.

You can do stuff like that in a big old barn. Needless to say, we didn’t have cellphones and video games. This was how we amused ourselves.

And when not entertaining myself, I would often go into the barn alone and just sit and think and read. It was a place of quiet, calm, serenity. It was a place of peace.

My grandfather and his siblings also had a barn. They grew up as the children of Italian immigrants in the Emporium/Rich Valley area of Cameron County, a gorgeous place of big mountains in north-central Pennsylvania. They were farmers who lived off the land, and a barn was central to such existence. They had every type of animal that a farm could sustain.

That barn was more of a conventional farming barn, filled with animals, especially chickens. My cousins and I would collect chicken eggs with “Papa” on weekend mornings and bring them back to the grandparents’ house to fry up with ham for breakfast for everyone. Anytime I smell ham and eggs, I think of that.

My grandfather’s barn and my dad’s barn both still exist, though the barn my dad bought was converted into a shop at what is now a golf-course driving range. When my dad sold the property, it eventually no longer remained a farm. I recently went there and walked around until the suspicious owner noticed and asked what I was doing. When I explained that my family owned the barn and I was savoring old memories, he didn’t seem very sympathetic. With tears in my eyes, I pointed around and tried to explain the memories and what the place meant.

Alas, I’m thinking of this now because I’ve been saddened to watch a classic old barn just down the street from us in Grove City, Pa., get knocked down in recent days. I’m always pained to see an old barn get torn down for some new housing development or for seemingly no reason other than that the barn is no longer being used as a barn.

Sure, in many cases, we’re told the old barn is maybe no longer safe and ought to be razed for safety and insurance reasons. But I wonder how true that often is. There are three barns within three miles of my house that were ostensibly torn down for those reasons. One was leveled about 10 years ago and is now a pile of rotting rubble. What a waste. The other (see photo) was just demolished next to an abandoned house that we used to call “the chicken house” because of the dozens of chickens that used to roam there courtesy of the now-deceased owner.

If that barn was genuinely hazardous, well, you could’ve fooled me. It took the wreckers weeks to take it down. Tractors, bulldozers. They probably needed a giant wrecking ball. Most million-dollar modern homes would collapse far more easily.

As they say, they don’t build things like they used to. And barns were something built to last.

All of which is further reason why I hate to see them knocked down. I especially feel that way when I see an old barn with a “Mail Pouch” chewing tobacco ad or some large mural/painting on the side, such as a giant American flag. Those images are emblems of what that time was like — as are the barns themselves.

Now, I drive by these one-time mementos of a simpler, slower, better time and say to my kids, “There used to be a barn here.” My kids listen as their old man waxes nostalgic about these strange old wooden structures. They no doubt find it a bit odd, but they also find it intriguing and ask, “Dad, let’s go find a barn and go inside.”

I tell them that I would like to, if we can find one.