Photographer focuses on farm icon for coffee-table book

By Kevin Cullen, Journal and Courier, Lafayette, Indiana

FOCUS ON BARNS: Photographer Don Scott uses his camera to capture the beauty of these rural icons for his coffee-table book. (Photo by Tom Leininger, Journal and Courier)

Give Don Scott a weekend and a tank of gas and you'll probably find him driving down some dusty country road, hunting big game.

He has photographed more than 700 Hoosier barns. Many are faded, forsaken monuments to a lost world of horses and wagons, scoop shovels and milking stools, square dances and harness bells.

Scott, 67, of rural West Lafayette, is a retired Purdue University plant pathologist. His new coffee-table book, Barns of Indiana, Volume 2, takes readers to -- and inside -- scores of the honest, hard-working structures that were once so central to farm life.

Scott has captured on film barns in all 92 Indiana counties, but he still gets a thrill meeting another proud survivor.

He remembers spotting the Governor McCray cattle pavilion, which was moved from Newton County to White County a few years ago.

"I knew about where it was, but when I turned down that road I thought, 'Boom! There it is. It has to be,' " Scott recalls, eyes twinkling.

Early barns, from the 1830s and 1840s, move him deeply. The impossibly massive, braced timber frames were sometimes made of black walnut with mortise-and-tenon joints and oak pegs. Such structures capture the essence of the pioneers and speak of a time that can only be imagined.

"You have to admire the skill that went into them, the hand-hewn logs. There were no drawings, no plans. The farmer just had an idea in his head, and it was built from the ground up," Scott says.

"You just wish those walls could talk. Most of the stories they would tell would be happy ones ... (Farming) was hard work and sweat, but mostly happiness."

Farm memories

Scott left his family's Marion County farm as a teen-ager to pursue a career in education and science, but memories of the old haymow, the cattle, the feed and the chores linger on.

For years, as a hobby, he took photos of barns as he traveled the state as an Extension plant pathologist.

"As I watched those magnificent structures disappear, I just thought that maybe somebody should take some pictures," he says.

He started sprinkling a few barn photos into his slide presentations on plant diseases. People loved it.

A freelancer in Peru, Ind., suggested that he do a book, and her publisher contacted Scott. Barns of Indiana appeared in 1997 and is now in its third printing. Proceeds from it, and from Volume 2, go to the Purdue Agricultural Alumni Association for scholarships.

Both books have been underwritten by Beck's Superior Hybrids.

Farmers buy them, but so do city folk hungry to "connect to our past," Scott says. "I get the most enjoyment out of the comment that 'I never looked at barns before, but now I do.' "

The new book flowed from the first. He still loves photography, and he and his wife, Jackie, enjoy traveling the state and talking to farm families about their barns.

"It's extremely interesting," Jackie says. "They are so proud of what they have. The stories seem to be retained and passed down."

Scott wanted Volume 2 to focus on barn interiors, with their odd geometries, shadow patterns, mangers, cobwebs and patina.

"Very few people in today's world have been in barns and even fewer have worked in a barn," he says. "But I had a stroke and couldn't climb, so the idea changed to more of a history of barns."

Marsh Davis, of Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana, provided an essay and photos of various barn types.

Most of the structures featured date from 1870 and 1920, the "golden age" of Indiana farming, says co-author Mauri Williamson, of West Lafayette, former executive secretary of the ag alumni association at Purdue.

Farm prices were usually good and mechanization boosted productivity. Farmers moved from log cabins to elegant homes, and "great barns were built all across the Corn Belt," he says.

"These barns are real icons of those great times and symbols of the family farm, of whole families living and working together, the basic way man was supposed to live," Williamson says.

Now manager of the Pioneer Farm and Home Show at the Indiana State Fair, Williamson says he'd give most anything to "buy a day, or a week to live in that period in Indiana."

He directed Scott to many of the barns shown in the book.

They were designed for horses, milk cows and tons of loose hay. Some are being restored but many more are being lost. It is often cheaper to build a metal pole barn for machinery storage than to reroof a landmark.

"I understand full well the cost (of maintenance) to farmers, who are usually not that well off," Scott says. "That new drill or tractor, or even a used one, is more important to the family than the barn is."

Dwight Sheets knows. He, two brothers and his father farm the Shadeland Farms on the Wea Plains near Lafayette. They are restoring an 1800s cattle breeding barn that appears in the book.

"It's part of the farmstead and part of growing up here," Sheets says. "It's the nostalgia. These old barns aren't really that useful anymore. It's more for the appearance of the farm and the pride we have in our place."

Another one of Scott's favorites is the Scholl Barn near Connersville, built in 1840. It is 80 feet long, 40 feet wide, and one of the oldest continuously used barns in Indiana.

Scott's photos capture the finely dovetailed corner joints, fieldstone foundation and wooden door latches.

The "Yaller Barn" is also singled out. It stands on Purdue's Throckmorton Experimental Farm on U.S. 231 south of Lafayette. Built in about 1840, it stood near the intersection of the Attica and Crawfordsville stagecoach routes before it was moved in the 1880s.

It originally was yellow, using paint made from skimmed milk, limestone dust and yellow clay -- a recipe that some say dates to ancient Egypt.

It was first used as a relay station for changing stagecoach horses, and as a stretching place for passengers, Scott says. Later, it was an inn and tavern for settlers moving west. They bought feed for their horses there, and fresh foods for themselves.

The "Yaller Barn" also was a camping point for drovers, farmers and other travelers on their way to the Chicago and Indianapolis markets.

It is still used for storing farm equipment, but most Indiana barns are "becoming museum pieces or being demolished, the end of an era," retired Purdue ag economist Don Paarlberg notes in the book's foreword.

They were built to last forever. No 1880s farmer could have imagined that his barn, raised with so much effort, ever would become obsolete or a liability.

"The barn took precedence over the house," says Paarlberg, 90, who grew up on a horse-powered farm in Lake County. "The barn was where you made your money; the house was where you spent it. If the house was more prestigious than the barn, it was evidence that the builder had his priorities wrong.

"It was a day more gentle than the present," he says. "Less of goods and more of heart."

About the book

Barns of Indiana, Volume 2 (The Donning Company, Virginia Beach, Va.) by Donald H. Scott and Maurice L. Williamson with contributions by Marsh Davis and Silas McGuffers is available for $40 plus $2 tax if picked up at the Purdue Ag Alumni Association Office at Purdue. By mail, send check for $47, to Purdue Ag Alumni Association, Room 1, Agricultural Administration Building, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907. Checks should be made payable to the Purdue Ag Alumni Association. Be sure to include a return shipping address