The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
Society offers tour of barns, hop houses
The Madison County Historical Society will present an Agricultural Development Tour: Settlement Period Barns to Hop Houses on Sunday, Sept. 15 from 9 a.m. – 3 p.m. Tickets are $62. Seats are limited and reservations are required by Sept. 6.
The tour promises to be a fun day of architectural history of barns and enjoyment of a six course hop inspired meal prepared by the Copper Turret.
This tour will commence and finish with a hop house, each about 2 miles from the other. It will include early barns that remain free standing and ones that have been built into dairy farm complexes. All have been modified to some extent to serve changing agricultural needs and one is a total replacement.
The area of the tour is just south of what was the Cherry Valley Turnpike, and the barns are all situated parallel or perpendicular to the roads, which follow the original survey grid.
The neighborhood also boarders on the Nelson Swamp, historically an impressive source of white pine and cedar, and the adjacent forested slopes with beech and hemlock after the chestnut was used up.
Guests will enter and look at a variety of early and later 19th cen- tury frames and discuss their volumetric proportions and how timber was hewn and sawn according to a layout system, including an example of scribe rule. The houses and dooryards which accompany the barns will be observed from the outside, includ-
ing the oldest house in the Town of Nelson.
Carl Stearns, preservation architect from Craw- ford and Stearns and Randy Nash, owner of New York Barn Company will lead the tour and share their vast knowledge on the development of the barns in CNY and the role of the hop industry in New York State.
The tour concludes with dinner at the Copper Turret where chef, Kerry Beadle has prepared a hop inspired meal. The first course is a house-made hop sausage with spicy beer vinegar sauce. The second course is a Bock Beer-brined corned brisket on braised red cab- bage.
The third course is a stout braised pulled pork carnitas with hop infused peach granita and cilantro crème fraiche. The fourth course is a beer marinated grilled flank steak with peach tomato salsa porter. The fifth course is a barbequed salmon on quinoa pilaf. The sixth course is a chocolate beer cheesecake with a pretzel crust.
Tour participants are asked to meet at the Cornell Co- Operative Extension office located at 100 Eaton St. in Morrisville at 9 a.m.
Tickets are limited and available at the society, or at www.mchs1900.org/hopfest. All proceeds from the Hop Fest support the educational programming at the Madison County Historical Society.