From the Introduction...
I have had only brief acquaintances with barns. As a child my grandfather, Carl W. Gustafson, took me along to buy fresh eggs from an old farmer of Scott County, Minnesota. His name was Louie Svoboda, a practically toothless Swede in worn overalls, who had never traveled the thirty miles up the road to Minneapolis. Some years later I scavenged wood from an old barn in Leominster, Massachusetts, to build a tree house. Then, as a teenager I played a number of band engagements at a refurnished barn which was occasionally used as a dance hall. Little do I know about my great, great, grandfather, George Dedrick/Diedrich, an immigrant from Alsace-Lorraine, who from 1860 farmed land east of Buffalo, Minnesota. He was among 92,000 farmers of the state in 1880. But in 1912 an article stated: #“A hundred years ago more than ninety per cent of the population lived on the farms or in very small villages. At the present time, nearly two-thirds of the people live in towns and cities#" (Farm Press, Aug. 1, 1912). No wonder that I was born in Evanston, Illinois, and grew up in St. Paul and Leominster.