A good old-fashioned barn-lowering

With the whine of hydraulics, a forklift carefully moves the massive, wooden double doors of the great barn to the side. Low autumn sunlight shines on the front half of the roof, gaping open below the barn’s cupola to reveal naked wooden beams. “It’s in good shape,” said Chuck Fryer, superintendent for Drury Construction, of the barn on former Bentryn winery property off Highway 305. “We’ve figured out how to take it apart and started taking off the roof. It should be done by end of day.”

With the whine of hydraulics, a forklift carefully moves the massive, wooden double doors of the great barn to the side.

Low autumn sunlight shines on the front half of the roof, gaping open below the barn’s cupola to reveal naked wooden beams.

“It’s in good shape,” said Chuck Fryer, superintendent for Drury Construction, of the barn on former Bentryn winery property off Highway 305. “We’ve figured out how to take it apart and started taking off the roof. It should be done by end of day.”

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Taking down the barn, donated by the property’s new owners to the Trust for Working Landscapes, is the first step in moving it to the Johnson Farm near Island Center.

There, it will be reconstructed in the lower pasture for the island’s 4H club to use. The two-story building has roughly 3,000 square feet on the ground floor alone.

“The barn is structurally very sound. It’s an amenity we believed the community should have, and so looked around for an opportunity,” said Andrew Lonseth of Vineyard Lane, which is developing the property now that the Bentryn winery operation has moved to Day Road.

Yolanka Wulff, interim executive director of TWL, and a consultant to Vineyard Lane, described the donation as a “wonderful opportunity” for TWL, which promotes open space, farming and affordable housing.

“We had always planned to put in a barn for 4H, but thought we would have to build it,” Wulff said. “When Vineyard Lane offered this, TWL was thrilled. The challenge is dismantling and moving it.”

Enter Drury Construction, brought in by Marty Sievertson, project manager for the Vineyard Lane development.

“Marty stepped up to the plate and said he wanted to donate,” Lonseth said. “That’s very significant. It would not be possible without them.”

Vineyard Lane also provided some funds for the dismantling and moving.

Volunteers tore out the internal drywall of the 1980s barn in one weekend, but taking the barn apart is five days of work for three men, something that would normally cost $5,000-8,000.

“The challenge is that it has to go back into the same shape it was,” Drury Construction superintendent Chuck Fryer said.

A simple demolition job would be a day’s work, he said. In this case, a good deal of thought went into how to disassemble the barn; every panel is marked for reassembly.

Fryer said it wasn’t something they had done before, but was much better than demolishing a good structure worth $15,000-18,000.

Wulff estimates building a new barn from scratch on the Johnson farm would be even higher.

At the end of next week, the panels were to be loaded onto a flatbed truck and stacked at the Johnson farm.

TWL still needs to raise funds for the reassembling.

“We will start fund raising for a barn-raising right away,” Wulff said.