The Thoreau Farm Trust’s 1st Annual Concord Barn Tour celebrating Concord’s agricultural heritage was a tremendous success—over 200 people turned out for the event. Below are the six barns featured on the tour.

Click here to read an Introduction to Concord Barns.

Clark Barn

“1855” is inscribed on both a sheathing board and an interior post in this double-ended, 6-bent New England barn. It is probably the second barn on the 18th-century Clark farm, built for Daniel Clark of the fourth generation. The off-center wagon door is typical of earlier three-aisled New England barns, in which the aisles were not of even widths. When possible, the hay mow aisle (here it is to the left of the door) was the widest, in order to maximize the storage area for the great piles of hay. The three levels of lofts also provide ample room for hay storage.

Built into the slope of the ground, this is a typical banked barn, with a full cellar that can be accessed at ground level on one side. The two-part interior sliding door design would later go out of fashion, to be replaced by a large single wagon door. The pine post-and-beam framing members are hewn and cut to the “square rule” method typical in mid-19th century barns. The enclosed room beside the door may have been a grain room, with tightly-fitted board walls to discourage rodents. After Daniel Clark died in 1867, Cyrus Clark, of the fifth generation, used the barn to house the cattle he raised for market. The base and part of the framework of the wooden cow stanchions are still in place at the inner edge of the east aisle. Cyrus Clark drove a horse to Brighton to trade in cattle until shortly before he died – at the age of 96 – in 1923.

Jones Barn

The front 4-bent section of this 96-foot three-aisle barn may have been built or greatly renovated by Hiram Jones in the 1850s, shortly after he returned to Concord from the California gold rush with enough “dust” to pay off the debts on the family farm. As in many New England barns, the front elevation gives information about what’s inside if one knows how to read it: While the facade looks symmetrical, the hay mow (left of the door to the drive aisle) is several inches wider than the other two aisles, setting the doorway just a bit off center. A smaller secondary door in the right corner leads to the passage behind the cows in the narrower livestock aisle. No window or door was necessary on the left part of the façade, where a wood-lined interior silo was located at the front end of the hay-storage aisle.

Later in the 19th century this barn was extended to the rear by adding three more bents. The roof of that section has the narrow 1-inch-wide ridge board characteristic of later barns, while in the earlier front section the rafters are pegged and tenoned into a heavy five-sided ridge beam. The fixed wood cow stanchions along the livestock aisle are a rare surviving feature, as are the horse stalls that were fitted into the rear part of the hay aisle. It is worth a trip to the cellar of this building, where many pieces of agricultural equipment are housed, including a 1947 John Deere tractor in working condition. The “stone boat” or sledge just outside the cellar entry was an essential piece of equipment for generations of farmers.

Lawrence Barns/Water’s Edge Farm

These two later New England barns were built on one of the oldest farms in the North Quarter, which remained in one family for over 200 years. In the 18th century the Lawrence family farm stretched over 500 acres to the border of Carlisle, and through much of the 20th, Lawrence descendants – parents, aunts, uncles and cousins – still occupied and farmed various parts of the property.

The great double-ended barn on the east side of the road, where horses are boarded and trained today, was built shortly after an earlier barn belonging to Edwin Lawrence burned down in 1898. Like the 1903 Carty Barn, the building represents the peak of New England barn development that had been reached just before 20th century changes led to a proliferation of other building forms. Even at this late date, the building’s mighty frame is still of square-rule, post-and-beam construction, with pegged joints and 7-inch-square posts. Sophisticated engineering had entered barn technology by the end of the 19th century, attested to here by features like the ventilation system that guides air flow to the two handsome, louvered ventilators on the roof ridge. The barn stands over a full cellar and is banked on two sides.

While there is some disagreement about the date of the farmstead across the street (according to 19th-century chronicler J.S. Keyes it was built in 1883), there is no doubt that it is one of Concord’s best examples of a “connected farmstead.” This distinctly New England building type consists of a multipart building with the farmhouse usually located at one end and the barn at the other. In between there may be wings, ells, and utility spaces such as a woodshed, wagon shed, or carriage house, all attached to each other. Here, the northernmost unit of the farmstead is another double-ended barn of the New England type, though smaller than the one across the road (5 bents long, rather than 10), and probably built in 1883 as one of the “nice modern comfortable structures” that Keyes described in his account of the property. New horse stalls have been built into the former north aisle of the main floor, and more stalls are currently being installed in the cellar. While this barn has vertical-board siding under the clapboards, and the roof has a glass-sided “lantern” or belvedere rather than an open cupola, there are enough similarities in the framing to suggest that the two Lawrence barns were constructed by the same builder.

Carty Barn

This 1903 barn was built on the 18th-century Farwell Jones farmstead by one of the larger turn-of-the-century dairy farmers in the east part of Concord. It replaced a small, deteriorated barn, and allowed James Carty to more than double his dairy herd between 1902 and 1904 to 35 cows and 3 yearlings. The next year he added a bull.

Later owners Aleck and Anna Nowalk, who called the property “Maplewood Farm,” built the milk house at the southeast front corner in 1946-47, and installed an interior wood silo in the northeast rear corner of the barn about 1951. The current metal silo, on a concrete base with a connecting passage, was built about 1972. The property is now part of Minuteman National Historical Park, and a herd of sheep is housed at times on the former milking floor.

The building is a magnificent example of the culmination of the three-aisle New England barn at the dawn of the 20th century, just before government regulations, mass production and new scientific approaches to farming were to change the agricultural landscape with new forms and types of outbuildings. All three aisles of the main floor have been laid out to house and manage the cattle herd, with the upper floor devoted completely to hay and feed storage. In spite of its late date, however, this is still a heavily-framed post-and-beam building with pegged, mortise-and-tenoned principal timbers. Features to note include the metal hay fork that runs along a track at the roof ridge, a calf pen, and enclosed work room at the southwest end of the livestock floor. It is the only example on the tour of a three-level “high-drive” barn, built with a rear ramp and wooden bridge that allowed hay wagons (and later trucks and tractors) to drive directly into the upper hay-storage floor.

Hunt/Hosmer Barn

Henry David Thoreau described the 1858 demolition of the 1701 house on this property which had belonged for generations to the Hunt family, and had been acquired from the last of them by his good friend, farmer Edmund Hosmer. Luckily, the old Hunt barn and the second Hunt House on the seven-acre “double houselot” were spared.

The barn is one of Concord’s few surviving English barns. It is certainly the largest, and may be one of the oldest outbuildings in town. Today, under architect Paul Minor it is undergoing a transformation to a residence – an example of the adaptive use that has saved many obsolete agricultural buildings from destruction. In this adaptation, a new exterior wall has been constructed outside the existing post-and-beam frame of the barn.

This is a “double” English barn, with two drive floors, one near each end. Their location is recognized by the lack of diagonal bracing at the doorway posts – a framing modification which left an unobstructed opening for hay wagons. Features of the frame suggest a construction date in the late 18th- or early 19th century, leading to the supposition that the barn may have been built about 1802, when Humphrey Hunt married Betsy Heywood and the adjacent house was enlarged. The primary timbers are hand-hewn, and include flared, or “gun-stock” posts that allow multiple mortise and tenon joints at the rafter/ tie beam/ wall post connection – the characteristic English tie joint. The roof frame is also an earlier type than the later barns on the tour: heavy principal rafters support a five-sided hewn ridge beam and intermediate purlins (cross-wise roof supports), which in turn hold the ends of the smaller common rafters.

This is a good building for observing the tool marks of the timber framer, including the marks of the adze on the hewn timbers and the Roman numeral-like “marriage marks” of the individually fitted scribe-rule joints.

Hubbard Barn/Thoreau Country Farm

This outbuilding continued to provide a home for animals even after 1996, when it was separated from the house at 352 Sudbury Road, moved onto a subdivided lot, and transformed into a comfortable two-story residence. A special pen was built into the new rear entry ell for a rescued owl, which for years went on vacations with the owners and took part in classes at Drumlin Farm. The building originally stood just behind the house that farmer Cyrus Hubbard (a friend of Henry David Thoreau) built for his son Charles upon his marriage to Nancy Wheeler in 1845. Charles Hubbard, who became one of Concord’s most progressive farmers of the mid-19th century, was a founding member and the first Treasurer of the Farmers Club. The architect’s design incorporated a remarkable amount of the building’s components. Most of the post-and-beam frame survives, including the flared two-story corner posts and the whole roof structure with 5-sided ridge beam. It is not clear just what the function of the building was, especially since a larger barn formerly stood over a stone cellar that still survives. Timbers in the first-floor ceiling are cut back and blackened, as if a chimney – possibly for a blacksmith’s forge – rose through the building. It may have had another specialized use, such as a cider house, since there is a full second story with the wide, worn floorboards still in place. A small second-story room has a painted floor and the marks of plastered walls on the studs. This room was a study in the 1930s and ‘40s when the property was owned by Benjamin Lincoln Smith.