Ruth Tremblay’s fascination with barns came about simply enough.

“I’d always liked barns,” she said. But growing up in Florida, there weren’t a great number of barns to stumble upon. When she moved to Minnesota, though, it was a whole different story.

Up the street from the photographer’s Waconia home, she found a beautiful barn, but day after day, she noticed the boards in its walls began disappearing.

“A lady told me they were tearing it down and if I wanted a picture, I’d better hurry up,” she recalled.

Tremblay grabbed her camera to snap some shots of the barn before it was torn down to make way for a housing development. In the end, the barn came down, but in a slumping market, the housing development has yet to go up.

“That sucks,” Tremblay responded.

But the experience had stirred something inside her. As she drove around the county, she found herself pulling over to the side of the road more and more often to take photos of people’s barns.

“Soon I got bolder and started driving down people’s driveways,” she recalled. Today, Tremblay makes regular visits to farm owners around the county. Many have become friends and together they are telling the stories behind the barns and the county’s earliest settlers.

“I realized how important it was to get to know them,” she said. “This is so much more than a snapshot.”

This weekend Tremblay will share some of her favorite barns and the stories and people behind them in a special fall barn tour, sponsored by the Carver County Historical Society and Friends of Minnesota Barns.

Tour a bygone era

Each year, the Friends of Minnesota Barns chooses a county in the state in which to do a barn tour. This year features Carver County in a tour that Carver County Historical Society Director Wendy Biorn considers critically important.

“In 100 years, we’re never going to be able to take this tour,” she said. “The barns won’t exist.”

Biorn worries that Carver County will go the way of Anoka County. “They have one dairy farm left,” she said. “We cannot lose touch with our rural roots.”

Barns were some of the first structures to be erected in Carver County and as the county continues to grow, they are disappearing at a quick clip. Tremblay has carved out a niche for herself in her barn photography – capturing images of the old barns before they are torn down.

Together with the county historical society, she is now working on a generations project, combining that photography with interviews of the farming families.

“If we don’t document it now, it will be lost forever,” said Biorn. “It’s an opportunity we’ll never have again.”

“These people built America,” Tremblay added. “But this isn’t the history you’re going to read in books.”

Tremblay characterizes those she has interviewed so far by how industrious they were and how contented they were with their lives.

“They got by with what they had and they were not afraid of hard work,” she said, noting how touched she was by their welcoming spirit.

“It was the reason I got so bold,” she said. “I’d ask to shoot their barn and they’d say ‘yes’ and then invite me in, saying ‘Come in here. I want to show you this.’”

Paintings

Like Tremblay, Michele Melina also understands the importance of capturing a bygone era. She is currently exhibiting “The Painted Barn: An Artist’s Tribute” at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum.

“As I have lived in eastern Wright County for 30 years, I have observed many farms and barns that make up the rural landscape between all of the small towns,” she wrote in an e-mail. “They provoke a memory or a feeling of time standing still and in our fast paced world I hope that this collection can evoke the feeling and emotion of times past and that we can hold onto our traditions.”

Melina said she has seen many of those farms disappear in Wright County as “rapid building of community and commerce have forever changed this farming landscape.”

Her collection contains paintings of several barns that no longer exist.

“I am amazed that these old structures have endured the storms, winters and wind like they have,” she wrote. “But they aren’t strong enough to endure the growth of our society.

“It was natural for me to paint this rural subject especially knowing that it may not be here for long.”

Education and preservation

The barn tour gives people a chance to see these structures as they still stand and understand how important they were to the farming community. Helping Tremblay organize the barn tour is Sarah Bowman. Bowman is a member of the Friends of Minnesota Barns – a volunteer organization dedicated to educating the public on the importance of barns and advocating for their preservation.

Bowman is fascinated by barns and what they can tell us about the people that built them.

“There’s always a story in a barn,” she said. “You can know what kind of people settled an area by the barn.”

Different barn styles and building techniques provide the clues to which ethnic group crafted the building. But it is the unique details that get Bowman fired up.

“You always find something unique,” she said, admitting a cupola fetish.

Such details make it especially hard to see the barns torn down. But Bowman and Tremblay understand the high cost involved in maintaining and preserving the barns. A new roof alone - one of the most common needs of old barns – can cost tens of thousands of dollars. And there is little aid for farmers that want to save their crumbling barns.

“Honestly, they can’t all be saved,” said Bowman. “So which ones do you save?”

Bowman said they hope their tours raise awareness and generate interest in barn preservation. Some of the barns she hopes to highlight on the tour have found new uses for the old buildings, including adapting the building to house a store or a farmer’s market.

She hopes to provide a good cross-section of the county’s barns on her tour – including some of the unique round barns - to give attendees an appreciation for the structures.

Meanwhile, Tremblay will continue collecting the photos and stories of those families who carried on the county’s earliest rural traditions.

“This is more than taking pretty photos,” she said. “This is these people’s lives.”

It’s a huge project, but one that both Bowman and Bjorn see as essential for the county.

“The most important thing we can do now is survey,” said Bowman.

Bjorn agreed. “So that people knew what was here.”

-Mollee Francisco, staff writer