Cathy Borner’s kitchen is crowded with gardening tools at the moment.
That’s because her potting shed, along with an almost 200-year-old barn, is being cut off her house.
The Canterbury resident is working with Common Man restaurant owner Alex Ray to save the historic barn. Hers is one of 15,000 to 20,000 such barns across the state, and by preservation standards, it will be one of the lucky ones.
“Barns in New Hampshire are disappearing,” Borner said, “primarily because people don’t have the money to put into it.”
Borner, a nurse, was in that situation before she met Ray. Her parents bought the house in 1980, and while they invested in a new roof decades ago, it didn’t last.
Two years ago, Borner said she went out one morning to the barn and noticed a light streaming through.
“I looked up and there was a hole six feet across,” she said. “Since then, several other holes have popped up. I’ve been tied in knots because I’ve been so fearful that the barn was going to collapse.”
This past spring, Borner got in touch with Ray, whom she met way back in 1993. He had been interested in the barn for years, Borner said, and it was now or never. She didn’t expect the barn to make it through another winter.
“He’s the only guy that saw the vision and had the guts to pull the trigger and say, ‘yeah, I can do this,’ ” Borner said.
“Basically the motivating factor is, I love old barns,” Ray said. “I’ve been looking at it with her for five years.”
He added that it was “in a bad way” and was “sway-backed,” clearly in need of help.
Ray thought about it, then said yes. Disassembly of the barn began Aug. 22, and it is being done by CCI Construction from Gilford and by Ray himself.
“I said, I don’t care what I gotta do, I gotta save it,” he said.
Three weeks into the process, just the “bones” of the barn are left. Ray said the main timbers, plus the walls, are still in great shape. After two more weeks of demolition, he plans to take all the pieces – carefully numbered, measured and organized – to one of two sites he’s currently looking at in the Plymouth area.
In the spring, Ray said he expects to begin reconstruction and renovation.
“We will reassemble it as is and hopefully it will be a good general use,” he said. “It’s too good to give up.”
Before it goes on to its new life, the barn had quite an old one. Borner said the 130 foot long, 40 foot wide, 58 foot tall structure was built in 1824 and held carriages, horses and other livestock for a massive Canterbury potato farm.
Sorting through old photos of the property under her kitchen table light, Borner held out a photocopy of a 1910 postcard showing the barn was part of the former Pleasant View Inn, too.
When her parents bought it in 1980, Borner said they joined an art cooperative in town and made pottery, and they also opened a Shaker reproduction workshop.
In all its capacities, Borner’s yellow-painted, Baptist Road barn has always been well-visited. Beginning in the 1840s, guests signed their names on the carriage house door, leaving behind a long list of people for Borner to examine.
Now that the barn is in pieces, Borner said she has plenty of passersby pulling over at her house, too.
“It’s the buzz around town,” she said. “I’ll tell you that.”
Borner will be keeping that record of visitors, plus the carriage house and the first 20 feet of the barn. As for the rest, she said she felt bittersweet – sad about saying goodbye to the historic barn, but relieved it wouldn’t be in danger of collapsing under the weight of a heavy snowstorm.
The house, Borner added, “is going to be given a whole new life.” She was contemplating her sister’s suggestion of creating a grotto out of the barn’s old granite foundation, and she said Ray would be doing some landscaping once the barn pieces were removed.
All of Borner’s planting items, of course, will be eventually moved out of her kitchen and into the remaining portion of the barn.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better scenario,” she said.
From the perspective of New Hampshire Preservation Alliance Program Director Beverly Thomas, Borner and Ray’s efforts to save the barn are the next best thing to keeping it on its original property.
“It could cost over $100,000 if you wanted to do a complete renovation,” Thomas said. “Understandably, most people don’t have that.”
She said the 15,000 to 20,000 historic barns across New Hampshire are often former dairy barns that are long, tall and in danger of water damage due to holes in the roof. In other words, they’re exactly like Borner’s barn.
“That was one of the problems and it continues to be one of the problems – the old big dairy barns are expensive to maintain,” she said. “Unfortunately, we’re losing them.”
Thomas’s organization does what it can. It has a small grant program to provide barn preservation assessments for New Hampshire property owners, and the preservation alliance also maintains a network of experienced timber frame contract workers.
Otherwise, Thomas said, “we don’t have any funding for doing the work. I wish we had it – we really need it.”
Oftentimes, she added, it’s just about working with property owners to find another landowner who wants a barn. Borner and Ray’s situation, Thomas said, was encouraging.
“Agriculture and the farm life – it’s such a huge part of our heritage in New Hampshire,” Thomas said. “These barns just tell the story.”
Historic barn owners interested in learning more can visit nhpreservation.org.
(Elodie Reed can be reached at 369-3306, ereed@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @elodie_reed.)