Restoring the Shepherd Barn
Funded by the Northampton Community Preservation Act and Private Donors
Thanks to major funding from Northampton's Community Preservation Committee, Historic Northampton has begun a project to restore the Shepherd Barn. Before we can restore the barn, we must unravel the mysteries of its history.
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View of the loft of the Shepherd Barn.
Photograph by Paul Shoul, who photographed the barn in March 2020 prior to the start of the project. |
Before any of the physical work began, we hired Jack Sobon, a master timber framer, author and architect, to write a detailed analysis of the structure's framing and carpentry.
During his career, Jack has drafted the plans for more than 300 timber-frame barns in our region and has become, in many ways, an architectural forensics detective. This past April, after spending a day in the barn, Jack discovered that the Shepherd “Barn” was not originally built as a barn or agricultural building. Sometime before 1850 it may have been moved here from elsewhere in town. His close inspection revealed:
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Dovecote openings in the east gable of Shepherd barn provide evidence that an owner raised pigeons.
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Knowing the date the structure was built is the starting point for researching the barn's past ownership for more clues. For years, some suggested the barn dated to 1820 to 1840; others 1840 to 1860. In 2016, we hired Bill Flynt, Historic Deerfield’s architectural conservator, to use a technique called dendrochronology to date the timbers. He collected samples from twelve pitch pine timbers and one oak timber. Back in his lab, he polished the cores and compared the tree ring growth pattern (tree rings correspond to annual weather conditions) to a database. In this case, the growth patterns revealed that the twelve pitch pine timbers were cut between 1801 and 1802; the oak timber dated to 1804. Based upon this study, we are focusing our research on the occupations of the earliest Shepherd house owners, as well as accounts of buildings being moved in town, particularly around the time the canal was built and in use in the 1830s. We know that the barn was in its present location by 1853 when it can be seen on a town map. Read the entire dendrochronology study here. |
This polished core sample shows tree ring growth.
The dendrochronology study was funded by a Community Preservation Act grant. |