MOUNT GILEAD — Friends of Ohio Barns (FOB) board and members invite the public to attend the 22nd annual barn tour and conference in Morrow County Thursday, April 27 through Saturday, April 29.
The Thursday event is sold out. Registration includes a tour of six barns and lunch on Friday plus Saturday’s day long conference featuring educational presentations, lunch, Barn of the Year awards, member meeting, and the silent auction.
Reservations are online only at http://friendsofohiobarns.org/annual-conference
The first stop on Friday’s barn tour is a Sweitzer barn with some unusual features. The next barn features clinched nails as in “dead as a door nail.” The builder took this common practice to a new level by using his creativity to make a nice pattern.
The third barn uses a very large triangular truss in the added straw shed. The fourth barn features a Gothic straw shed which is constructed differently from the original timber frame barn.
The next to last stop will be a barn with a gable-to-gambrel roof to enlarge the storage area for straw. The last barn on the tour has threshing floors laid in three different ways. This floor is double planked so grain will not “Fall through the cracks.” Please note that there is no longer an option for only Friday’s barn tour and pre-registration is required.
Saturday’s conference at Flying Horse Farms, an impressive, multi-acre camp in Mount Gilead with its adaptively reused “Big Red Barn” as a center point, will serve as the perfect setting for the day. Pre-registration is required.
Keynote speaker Alan Miller will kick off the conference with his presentation “The Adventures of Uncovering the History of Your Farm.” Miller teaches journalism at Denison University and was also the Executive Editor of The Columbus Dispatch and Regional Editor for USA Today Network Ohio’s 21 newsrooms across the state.
After Miller is Consulting Forester Dave Duell owner of Legacy Wildlife will speak on land stewardship and conservation, as well as the varieties of timber in the Morrow County region. The final morning speaker is local historian, Mike Wilson from the Morrow County Historical Society who will provide us with a historical overview of Morrow County.
After a break for lunch Barn Detectives Rudy Christian and Dan Troth will take a humorous review of the many highlights of the the previous day’s ban tour. After that Matt Stooksbury, Program Administrator for Morrow County Soil and Water Conservation District will present on farmland preservation.
Then FOB Board member Tom O-Grady will talk about Indian Signal Trees, one of which is on Alan Miller’s own farm. Finally, Raymond Friend will present, “Keeping Ohio Barns in Ohio by Creating Ohio Homes.”
Be sure to bring your “treasures” for the silent auction which raises funds to help defray conference costs. Friends of Ohio Barns is a 501c3 non-profit membership based organization created to promote awareness of the significance of Ohio’s historic barns through educational opportunities that bring together barn owners, barn lovers and folks who believe in the stewardship of Ohio barns.
Visit the website at http://www.friendsofohiobarns.org/annual-conference for more information and to
register online for the XXII Friends Ohio Barn Conference. For information or questions, contact friendsohiobarns@gmail.com.
