The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
BRUNCH AT THE BARN
Benefit today for Dudley Farm’s ‘Big Barn Project’
GUILFORD >> Earlier this spring, workers from Madison’s East Guilford Construction faced a tall task.
It involved a 175-year-old shed built by Dudley farmers to house the sleigh that would serve as their only means of transportation through the winter. It had grown so dilapidated that it seemed on the verge of falling off the building.
As of last week, the shed, meticulously restored by Mike Donofrio and his crew with native wood from North Guilford, stands sound and stable. So does the original 1845 barn, with stonework by Bobby Barth. And, soon, a handicap ramp.
The near completion of the shed and the original barn is among the reasons the Dudley Farm Museum is pulling out all the stops for its third annual Brunch at the Barn today. The affair will feature catering by
The Marketplace at Guilford Food Center with a variety of local products from the Dudley Farm Farmers’ Market, entertainment by the Dudley Farm String Band, and a silent auction.
Its purpose: to raise funds for The Big Barn Project, an effort at once to restore the physical integrity of the multipurpose structure and to reinvent it as a place to enable visitors — in particular, children — to experience the workings of the set of buildings as it functioned in the late 1800s.
“Barns are a tangible link to our shared past,” said author Bill Black, assistant treasurer of the Dudley Farm Foundation. They are also, as Thomas Durant Visser writes, “endangered species,” with nearly a thousand lost to fire, collapse, or bulldozers each year.
The complex of barns that is the Big Barn Project is not just an endangered species. It’s also an exceptionally rare one, according to Black, and not just because it’s survived with all parts largely intact, an eventuality that is “unheard of,” said architect Will Thompson.
It’s five barns in one that developed as the farm developed and the needs of the farmers changed, with every part built for a purpose: an additional barn for farm equipment on top and a lower stay for sheep, cows, and horses; a workshop for making repairs on farm implements; and, of course, the sleigh shed tacked on to get around in winter.
All of which, said Janet Dudley, vice president of the Dudley Foundation, had the Big Barn functioning as “the center of the farming family’s lives” and “their security against an uncertain world.”
The distinctiveness of the Dudley Farm Museum barn complex likely explains the steady increase in funds raised for the Big Barn Project in grants, matching donations, and individual contributions over the past two years, according to Black.
That kind of generosity “helps to keep the ball rolling,” said Black. It means that, “with the barn’s wooden roof replaced, the stone foundation and the granary rebuilt, and the original barn and sleigh shed restored, the project is nearing its third and final phase.”
Still, it’s the attention to detail and workmanship on the structure that, perhaps not ironically, is of a piece with the ingenuity practiced by the farmers who kept Dudley Farm going year after year, and bodes well for the living museum long contemplated by the Foundation.
Not least on the formerly crumbling sleigh shed.