Old barn making its final passage at farmyard near Marion Reservoir

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN CYNTHIA MARTENS
The idyllic scene is not hard to imagine in Marion County-a stately red barn sitting on 141/2 acres, providing shelter for cattle and boasting a second-story hayloft.

But that was in the early 1970s when Greg Plenert lived on his father’s farm on Kanza in rural Hillsboro and the barn served the needs of the farming family.

Thirty years later, the barn leans precariously to one side, much of the wood is rotted, and the roof is beyond simple repair. The new owners are having it torn down for its lumber, and eventually a run-off pond will take its place.

“It was very run down,”said Kenny Henson, current owner of the property and sagging barn, scheduled for demolition this summer, and looked somewhat like a prehistoric dinosaur fossil with its rib cage exposed.

“If I’d won the lottery and had millions, I’d probably have restored it,” he said, estimating the cost to restore it could reach $50,000.

Henson, a lumberjack, and his wife, Lisa, a full-time nurse and homemaker, have one son, Corbin, 8 years old.

The couple purchased the property two and one-half years ago and have been making steady improvements to the home, outbuildings and grounds.

“This is the old Charlie Plenert place,” Kenny said. “I understand when they put the (Marion) reservoir in, they moved the barn from the reservoir to here.”

The age of the barn certainly goes beyond 30 years, but how far beyond that is yet to be discovered.

Greg Plenert, who grew up on the farmstead, said, “The barn was in good shape when my Dad moved it over here.”

During the first few years of its renewed life on the Plenert property, the old roof was replaced with a new one. But as years went on, the cost of maintaining the entire structure became difficult, and it slowly deteriorated, Plenert said.

“We kept calves in there and stored hay in the loft.”

Plenert said his best barn memory was playing in the loft in the hay bales. But any sadness he feels in its demolition is because of the memories it holds of his youth and the fact that it was on his family homestead.

About a month ago, Gary Helmer, a friend of the Hensons, and Helmer’s brother-in-law agreed to tear down the barn for the lumber they could salvage.

“I think one of them is going to build a new home, and they’re going to use part of the lumber in the home,” Kenny said.

If the two had three to four solid days to concentrate on their project, they could probably have the remainder of the structure down, Kenny said.

“But both of them are farmers, and they’re taking care of their crops. I told them to just take their time-Gary and I are good friends.”

The barn, stretching north to south, had small entrances at each end of the building.

“You couldn’t utilize the openings,” Kenny said. “They were too narrow.”

What items he was able to fit inside-lawn mowers, bicycles, a small Ford tractor-were removed to make way for the demolition project.

Lisa said she was sorry she didn’t take any pictures of the barn before it was torn down, but in place of a photo, the couple offered descriptive details of the structure.

It had barn siding, a shake roof, and about eight to 10 stalls for cattle. An interior vertical ladder, securely attached along one wall, ascended to an opening at the top to gain entrance into the hay loft.

“At one time, the barn had a hay hook,” Kenny said. “And it had an old pulley up there that my wife will eventually hang from the ceiling in our house.”

Lisa said she plans to preserve a bit of the barn’s nostalgia by attaching a rope to the pulley and using it to hang a pot of flowers. In her bedroom, she’s already displaying an old wooden nectarine box discovered in the barn.

The nails originally used to build the structure were square with square heads, Kenny said.

“I believe at that time, that was the only nail that they made. I didn’t see any wood pegs.”

An old concrete-block foundation-now in a state of disrepair-was the support for the building, and the lumber abutting the foundation was “all rotted out there,” Kenny said.

“And the floor was rotted out of the second story-you’d have to watch where you stepped or you’d fall through.”

The barn siding was “in very bad shape,” Kenny said, but the vertical structure wood was salvageable.

“Those vertical structure pieces-they’re 16 feet long-you could cut 2 feet off and still have some nice lumber.

“And that’s what they mainly took it down for was the dimensional lumber-the bigger lumber-not the other stuff. They didn’t take it down for the siding.”

But Kenny said that fact hasn’t stopped people from calling him to see if they could have some of the barn-wood siding.

“We’ve had people from out of town-from Wichita, Sedgwick and even from Texas-call us and ask about the barn wood,” he said. “I just put them in contact with Gary.”

Lisa said they will keep enough barn wood to make picture frames. And Kenny had some plans for the wood, too.

“I’m going to use some of it to display my barb-wire collection,” he said. Kenny has a collection of 51 different styles of barb wire that he has picked up in his travels.

When the barn is gone and the wood hauled away or burned, Kenny said he will be ready for future plans for the ground where the barn once stood.

“Eventually, within the next couple of years, I want to build a pond out there,” Kenny said.

He said he’s hoping about 80 acres of runoff will keep a one- to one-and-one-half acre pond full.

“I love to fish and so does Corbin-so we want to have a nice pond on the place.”

And where was the family going after telling their story that morning?

“We’re going fishing,” Kenny said.

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