I bought our farm when twenty five years younger. The farmer had retired, and I had no interest in farming. The huge barn blew down in an awful windstorm. That generated a substantial, and welcome, check from the insurance company. The two brick silos at one end remained. We put concrete platforms on the tops. We reached them by a complicated flight of stairs so we could use them for high-altitude patios. A couple of times, we did exactly that.
Now, I’m too old to pretend that the patios-in-the-sky have any use at all. Bricks are starting to fall off a couple of places. The silos are coming down. They had been the pride and joy of the old family, who’d put them up around WWI.
This afternoon, they will be a pile of rubble. Our biggest problem is finding a place to dump the bricks.
It’s going to be a day for demolition. An old, collapsing corncrib will be removed, as well. Even if I were to farm the farm again, the old buildings would be useless. “A barn isn’t even good for a barn, any more.”, a farmer once explained to me. “Everything is different, now.”
The Church has far older buildings that are still in use. The Body and Blood are still provided to the faithful in ways that have not changed. But, there aren’t as many farmers going to Church because there aren’t as many farmers. As tractors and implements get bigger, fewer farmers are needed. A few miles North of town, one farmer and a half-dozen assistants take their huge machines around to seven thousand acres of scattered fields. On those fields, they more food than forty five or fifty families used to produce.
Old farm buildings continue to be brought down.
