Word: barnes
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Some along the mountainside survived as the water surged by just below them in the valley. Farmer Valentino Tretter saw the cloud of white dust raised by the torrent and climbed above the valley road to investigate. "Soon after, the mud came across my garden and my barn," he recalled, "I shouted toward the house of the Vinante family, which is a little underneath mine, but in a few moments it was wiped away. Adriano, his wife Pauola and their three children--all are dead...
...years since Richard Babcock first mounted his pickup truck to rescue a colonial barn in distress, snatching a comely example of Scottish extraction, circa 1710, from the jaws of damp rot in Lenox, Mass. After eight months he had tenderly transformed her timbers into a family home in New Marlboro, 18 miles south. Thus was ignited the peculiar passion that, 75 recyclings later, still drives the master builder. "I'm an evangelist, truth to tell," he says. "Some men are called to save souls. I was called to save barns...
This cool spring afternoon, the salvation site is suburban. One hundred yards from the Merritt Parkway, 1½ rush hours from Manhattan, the frame of a born-again Babcock barn climbs skyward in Fairfield, Conn. After eight years in their 200-year-old farmhouse, Advertising Executive Rick Baker and his wife Cathy called on Babcock to erect a colonial barn addition, which will hold a new living room and a cluster of bedrooms. They wanted more space, but they also wanted to respect the region's history...
Around this frame of a 1690s French sheep barn, Babcock will build walls of pine siding and insulation and a shingled roof. Protected from the elements, the ancient timbers become an indoor exhibition. The entire project will cost $80,000--something of a bargain, Babcock reckons, for such historic shelter...
Good money might be made in this trade. But Babcock is not in barns for the sake of business; he is in business for the sake of barns. "They are our strongest link with the colonial past," he says. "Preserving them, we preserve history; we preserve art." And sometimes, the subjects of art. From her window, Grandma Moses painted the Bakers' barn where it once stood in upstate New York, on land, it so happens, belonging to a Yankee Babcock forebear, six generations back...