The Barn

Adams County, IL the Loos home place

The Barn

I grew up in the era when my Dad still told the story about how he had to walk to school and it was uphill both ways. It turns out that he did milk a cow or cows before school and the barn was across the creek from the house, so he literally walked up the hill to the barn and up the hill to carry the milk back to the rock creamery by the house. This farm is in Adams County Illinois where the first Loos family arrived from Germany in 1839. The brothers migrated to this area and ended up with three farms on the same road. The details of the early days are not well documented but I would certainly like to find out exactly how all of that played out.

(Thanks to my Aunt Debbie Demerath for photo.)

The house and barn are where my Dad grew up, as did my grandfather and his father before him. My grandfather allowed his dad to sell this place to a neighbor in 1972 without keeping it in the family for the next generations to come. I was 6 years old when this happened but certainly have vivid memories of working cows and pigs and butchering chickens at the old home place. I have wonderful memories of gathering eggs with Grandpa and going to Quincy to peddle the eggs and get the supplies Grandma needed from town.

Family folklore says the barn was built in 1889. I did a quick search of when farms built the traditional old red barns in this part of Illinois and the results suggested that between 1890 and 1920 farmers built this type of barn. It is still in amazing shape for being well over 100 years old. I grew up 5 miles from this farm and so it has become a person tradition to walk through the woods and across the fields (and now an interstate) to the old barn on Thanksgiving weekend. This year I took that hike with my nephew and two of our daughters. We always start out headed toward the spring that exists between the farms. In the past 30 years, the place where the water comes to the surface has moved by 100 feet and I am curious to know why.

The real story I want to share is the marvel of this barn, built without modern technology in the late 1800’s. The barn has three levels. I mentioned they built it across the creek and there is great reason for that. The bottom level is actually buried in the East bank of the creek. At ground level on the west side, you can drive right into the barn, or back a wagon load of hay in there. Of course there is a hay mound that has a direct drop chute for sending hay to the lowest level to feed the cows. There are a number of grainery rooms right next to another door on the north side of barn that is, again, down enough of an incline that scooping grain off the wagon has gravity as your friend.

The construction is an absolute masterpiece. The bottom level is 100% rock that came directly from the creek that is crossed to get to the barn from the house. The timbers are massive and I assure you they came from that place and the trees would have dominated the landscape at that time. I just think of the blood, sweat and tears that went into building something of this magnitude when your best tool was a mule.

Aside from all the construction, I think about how important this building was to the farmers 100 years ago. I know some of us spend a lot of time in barns today but literally the entire life of farmer 100 years ago was spent in a barn like this. And let’s not forget that this area of the country didn’t get electricity from Adams County Electric Coop until June 28, 1938. This traditional red barn represents the era when farming became the endeavor that enabled our nation to become self-sufficient and establish generational businesses.

The barn has not really housed livestock since it left our family’s ownership in 1972. Today it sits alongside the interstate with a flag painted on the door that people notice as they drive down the road. What saddens me is the lack of understanding of what that barn represents in the history of this nation. It not only provided protection to the animals and crops it housed but it enabled a family to carve a place in the world, marking an era of significant toil that built the greatest nation in the world. That barn stands today to remind us of what is really at stake.