BAnNS. 
403 
BARNS. 
BY EGBERT J. WOOD, BARABOO. 
[Read at the Sank County Farmers’ Convention, March, 1877.] 
“ I hate long stories and short ears of corn, 
A costly farm house and a shabby barn.” 
It is noAv more than thirty-eight years since we (my father’s fam¬ 
ily) came to Wisconsin territory. It could not be otherwise than 
that we should suffer from the discomforts and rejoice in the free¬ 
dom of such a strange life to us. 
It is among the compensations of nature that while our climate, 
with its rugged vicissitudes, makes it necessary that much should 
be done to make ourselves and our animals comfortable, yet this 
same climate gives the ruggedness, the pluck, the reaching out of 
energetic impulses, that largely overcome all its disadvantages. 
We were enabled to gradually sweep away all that class of troubles 
that men can conquer single-handed. With the blessing resting 
upon us of what seemed then, and seems yet, upon looking back, 
an especially smiling Providence, we passed rapidly through the 
log-house and straw-hovel period into the more permanent framed 
house and barn condition. That barn was not a good one, though 
of almost the exact dimensions of what I shall give to-day as the 
minimum size for a model farm barn for general uses. A mistake 
was made in putting the driving floor through lengthwise. That 
arrangement will greatly cripple the usefulness of any farmer’s barn, 
of common size, especially in horse-fork usage. 
As farmers, we have the dilemma presented to us of short sum¬ 
mers for production and long winters for consumption, and we 
must take a determined hold of both horns or we go under. The 
farmer who builds a good barn renders this dilemma powerless to 
such an extent that it may be called, so far as he is concerned, “an 
improved Short-horn,” for he practically lengthens the summer by 
saving all of, and perfectly, the summer’s production, and shortens 
the winter by economizing the heat that exposed animals are robbed 
of, and has remaining, over and above the gain in milk and meat, 
