The Barn Straightener

Ray Chamberlain's mission is to put old barns right with the world again.

Barns still stand, many of them derelicts—their big doors open and empty like two-story yawns on the face of the land. They are not only a priceless architectural legacy, but a window into America’s past, back to a time when nearly everyone who owned a horse would own a barn as well, and that was just about everyone. The old barn was like a glass milk bottle; it looked good and it worked.

On small farms the old barns still find a purpose, but less so on larger farms and ranches. The race to save these old leviathans is being both lost and won. New York State offers grants to fix up and save old barns, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation has a program called “Barn Again!” to do the same. Its website is www.barnagain.org.

Others are turning barns into homes, or finding other uses for them. Still others are buying and moving old barns to find new life on a new site. (An Internet search “old barns” will turn up many people looking to buy or sell a barn.) The old timber frames are works of art, assembled without a single nail.

At 75, Ray Chamberlain has more barns on his “a’kilter list” than he knows what to do with. His straightened monuments stand tall from eastern Minnesota to Nebraska’s Sand Hills. The prairie winds and a tornado now and then keep him busy.

“I like the challenge,” says Chamberlain, who lives near Sinai, S.D. (pop. 133). “And I haven’t found a barn yet that I couldn’t fix.”

Chamberlain drives an old, red truck packed with barn-straightening accouterments, mostly homemade. These include 600 or 700 feet of half-inch cable, various pulleys and levers, carpenter tools and mechanic’s wrenches, ladders, and railroad ties. Add the hand winches and Chamberlain has about 70,000 pounds of barn-pulling power.

His seven sons once helped him tighten the wind-humming cables, rig up the braces, and work the jacks. But they’re grown now and busy elsewhere. Chamberlain is looking for a qualified apprentice.

“I need a farm boy who can stand up to hard work,” he says, flipping his baseball cap forward to scratch his barn-dusty scalp.

Over the last 35 years, Chamberlain figures he’s brought about 4,000 barns back to plumb. It’s hard work and can be dangerous. “I’ve had eight broken ribs and two skull fractures when things didn’t go just the way I’d planned them,” he says.

Chamberlain grew up on a ranch near White River, S.D. He was raised around skittish cattle and mean-spirited range horses. “There was always a kicked-in corral to fix, so I learned about bracing and using big timber as a boy,” he says.

Later, he managed the lumber yard in Waubay, S.D. One day after a storm, an insurance adjuster asked Chamberlain’s wife, Blanche, if she knew anyone who could straighten a barn. She volunteered her husband. “I’d never done anything like that, but she told him I could fix anything,” Chamberlain recalls. He accepted the job and made some mistakes. But he also learned lessons using equipment he bought from a retired barn straightener.

“I’ve always been kind of a tinkerer and I liked to figure out how to solve problems, so I found this business to be a lot of fun,” he says.

In 1999, Chamberlain resurrected Virgil Strenge’s tornado-ravaged barn near Brookings, S.D. It had one end blown out, was nudged from its foundation, and had a pronounced lean to the east. It presented Chamberlain, the “tinkerer,” with a little more figuring than he was accustomed to. The barn’s loft was nearly filled with more than 40 tons of hay bales.

The barn had sentimental value for owner Strenge, 69. “My granddad built it in 1919. I played in it as a boy and worked in it as a man. One of my boys and I planned to fix it up someday for old-time’s sake,” Strenge says.

“But after that tornado, I figured I’d have to tear it down before it fell down. Then I heard about Chamberlain and gave him a call.”

Chamberlain, working alone, attached cables in just the right places, used railroad ties and jacks to hold everything in place, and levered the sagging Strenge barn, hay bales and all, back into plumb. He pulled it back onto its foundation, nailed support timbers across the wall studs, and patched the blown-out siding. “It’s amazing how he bought it back,” Strenge says.

Chamberlain is one of the few professional, full-time barn straighteners around. He also may be the oldest.

“You don’t find many of us in the yellow pages,” he quips.

Chuck Cecil is a newspaper columnist and freelance writer in Brookings, S.D.

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