Yeasting.com | Memoirs of G. Emerson Yeasting

remember on the Null farm there was a barn, had been originally a house and barn, and it was another farm back to back, end of our place which went from one mile road to the other. Anyhow, that old barn was all that was left back there, and it wasn't doing any good there, so Dad decided he would move it up to the front of the farm, almost a mile. So we built the foundation for it out of cement blocks. Then I remember he hired a guy that had these big – it looked something like the carriages of a large bomber - it would be like four or eight wheels to a set. [Emerson served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II.] Only they were wood wheels, probably about a foot wide and a foot in diameter on heavy truck like things, and they were steerable. They jacked the barn up, then they put these things under it and that barn was about – oh, I'd say forty by eighty maybe. They had quite a few sets of these under there. First they'd cut some long beams and put them under it to hold these things. Then they're all tied together some way or other, and some were steerable in the front. And then we would take the team of horses, and I know we had to take down a couple fences temporarily, and we had – what do you call it, the pulleys – can't think of the name. We used a bunch of pulleys, anyhow. And you know, the horses would walk a hundred feet, maybe. Like I would be driving them a lot because Dad was back cranking the other guys [cables] on to things or back at the barn watching, and I would drive the horses up maybe a hundred yards. And by doing that, the barn would move maybe six feet because of the way it was geared down. So anyhow, we spent weeks moving that barn. We finally got it up there on its foundation. It was still there up until just a few years ago. I think they tore it down.

First of all, I think I should first go back on an item [on the first tape]. I mentioned earlier the moving of the barn on the Null farm, and I couldn't think of a couple of the terminologies I wanted. One of them was the fact that the rope system was block and tackle, and as I remember, there were several – like four pulley units. So this thing was really geared down. Another thing I forgot to mention, well, the wheels, I said, were about a foot in diameter and about a foot wide and made out of wood on steel axles which were greased with grease from the oil tanks. Anyhow, we did this in the wintertime. And while there was snow places and times – there were times when there wasn't – the ground was frozen pretty hard, so Dad had cut an old maple tree into two–by-twelves, and we used these as runners – or as a road, you might say. In other words, the men would carry these – as I recall, they were two-by-twelves, about ten, twelve foot long – would carry these to the front of the barn, lay them in front of the rollers, then we'd move the barn six, eight feet, whatever it was. Then they'd pick up the logs from the back and move them to the front again, and that took a lot of time. But anyhow without that it would have been pretty rough going, and we probably would have broken a few wheels here and there. That worked out all right.