By the time I came along, if you consider its original purpose, the horse barn was technologically obsolete. On our farm, the horse barn was an addition to the main cow barn in which, as the name implies, the horses needed for farming were housed and cared for and fed. The horse barn was a good-sized structure all on its own, two stories tall, built on a hand-cut stone foundation and parallel to the main barn. It was offset from the main barn, so the horse barn had three walls all its own and shared half of one wall, the south wall, with the cow barn. Within this shared wall were two large doorways through which cows, horses, heifers, cats, sheep, or people could go from one barn unimpeded into the other.

I don’t have a date on the horse barn, but I can tell it was built later than the main barn because most of the timbers were cut with a sawmill blade, not hand hewn like the cow barn, and the nails were not hand forged. Probably part of a post-Civil War economic boom.

When my father was a kid on this farm the work was done by horses, work you see only in old oil paintings, like hauling the hay wagon across the field, a wagon onto which the workers threw the hay high into the air with three tined wooden hay forks to build a pile of loose hay on the wagon before getting it into the hay mows. Teams of horses plowed the fields, pulled cultivators (weed control), and hauled cans of milk to market. Without a good team of horses, you really had no farm. The first tractor that came to the farm had iron wheels with spikes on the wheels to give it traction. There’s a picture of it somewhere with my grandfather sitting on it in shirtsleeves and driving it like the machine was actually in control. So, my father knew farming with both tractors and horses, and while he always liked to have a horse or two on the farm for nostalgic sake, there was no way he was going to go without whatever farming improvements came along. Life was hard enough. One of the more notable horses he had during our time on the farm was a retired New York City police horse, a big lunker of a horse named Rusty. Rusty really did like retirement and hated it when someone tried to ride him, and he had the trick of running as close as he could to tree trunks, or low hanging tree limbs, trying to knock the rider off, or decapitate the brazen human and turn him, or her, into a one-legged headless horseman. That horse was mean.

But even Rusty did not live in the horse barn.
The lower level of the horse barn had big box stalls in each corner of the building and in the middle, now that the horses had been superseded, rows of cow stations for the heifers and younger calves. The box stalls served pregnant cows waiting to give birth. The stalls were usually bedded with sweet hay, or straw, and each had its own feeding stanchion, or feed box. My father could keep better track of things during the last days of pregnancy. Within these stalls the calves would learn to stand up within hours of birth, and the space was like a sanctuary for them, and it was easier for the vet to be alone with the mother, or calf, if there were problems and a doctor called.

Upstairs of the horse barn was a hay mow divided by a wooden wall reaching to one of the collar ties. In the northeast corner, a ladder was built into the wall, simple boards nailed against the wall studs, and climbing this would bring me up into the mow, where I was the mow boy, stacking the bales of hay in neat rows so the full space could be used in an efficient manner. The horse barn mow was always the last mow to be filled in the summer, and if there were droughts or other irregularities, it would not be filled at all. It was difficult to reach from the outside, hard to set up the hay elevator, and darker than the main barn’s mows.

In his prime, my father kept injured birds of prey in this dark mow -- red-tail hawks, owls, kestrels, and others -- long before the Endangered Species Act was passed; and once it was, I think his good-hearted activities became illegal because he had no license to work with birds of prey, injured or otherwise. Hundreds of school kids learned not to shoot these birds as he dragged his cages and birds to school rooms across the county. One time someone called him about an injured golden eagle from over along the Delaware and he brought the bird home and had it in his wood workshop because he was afraid of the havoc it would generate in the horse barn mow. He wrote about the eagle, as it healed, and the DEC got wind of it and took the bird from him. They were loathe to bring charges against him as his work was so fine and he saved the majestic bird when no one else would dare get near it. The wingspan nearly filled the shop. Not me! The haymow was spooky enough when I climbed up there in the near dark with owls over my head and fur balls on the hay bales, and I was always in a hurry to get that job done and bales down the chute before my head was scarred with talon incisions or my eyeballs pecked out -- the horse barn.