Amish Barn Raisings

            It’s iconic, don’t you think – an Amish barn raising.  Kids have been told to stay back for safety, but you just can’t expect a boy to stay out of the rafters.  Girls are the same, so all around the framing and hoisting, the kids scamper in and out.

            The women stay back too, but for a different reason.  There is food to prepare and serve, and every family has brought something to contribute.  There are tables set up in the shade, sometimes dozens of them.  There are benches set around the tables, usually the same benches used in the Sunday services.  Iced tea and coffee are available as soon as the sun comes up, and the men come down out of the rising structure when they need to.  But that seems to be improbably seldom.  The men stay at the work relentlessly, the women stay busy with food preparations, and the kids play, or work at assigned chores like tending the horses or carrying supplies.  When noon approaches, the men start coming down for lunch in shifts.  They will have already been at it for six or seven hours.

            That’s when you’ll see a few of the more determined men clustered at the peaks in small groups, unwilling to lose the momentum they have acquired, and unwilling to come down for lunch until that last brace has been fit or that last joist has been set.  And that’s a good time to take a picture from a distance, so long as none of the faces can be recognized. 

            The foundation of this barn was laid a week earlier by stone masons from Pennsylvania.  The wall studs were nailed into place to make whole sections, on the ground the day before.  The last man came out of the barn sometime around midnight, but I know that only because I went back out the next day and asked around. 

            We have a lot of these barn raisings in Holmes County.  The Amish are particularly good at it.  But they need to be.  They don’t use lightning rods on their structures.  The bishops don’t allow it.  There’s a religious reason for that, but it borders on plain superstition, and the logic of it will not stand up to careful scrutiny.  The most plausible explanation I have heard is that lightening rods are thought to invite attacks from the Devil.  The irony is that Amish barns, lacking lightning rods, therefore burn down more often than the English ones.  So of course the Amish become very adept at raising new barns for their neighbors and families.  They have good reason to be experts.