barns

Fall 2010 Release

 

From the Introduction...

I have been photographing barns for a number of years now. Some of my subjects are gone; many others are derelicts, left to the mercy of the elements. It has been estimated that in Iowa alone about a thousand barns fall annually. Just one windstorm in 1941 brought down 600 in South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. When the last of the old barns is gone, the younger generation will little realize the history of their forebears or the land they live upon (Allen G. Noble and Richard K. Cleek, The Old Barn Book, 1995, 3). 
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.

Barn Gallery Mark Diedrich Photography