BARN REBUILD: RESTORING WITH A PURPOSE

Restoring older buildings is a situation many rural landowners face, whether they purchased a property with aging structures they want to use, or they’re weighing the options of preserving history.

My family fell into the latter category when we returned to my husband’s family farm in 1997. The land sits on the banks of the Big Sioux River in eastern South Dakota, and was homesteaded in 1870 by his great-great-great-grandparents, Carl and Carolyn Swanson. In 1889, they constructed a dairy barn north of their cabin home. A few years later, they added a larger barn onto the west side of the dairy barn, and a few years after that, they built a classic farmhouse nearby. (The livestock’s needs were met long before the Swansons moved out of the log cabin!) My husband’s immediate family