LOCATION
The location of the proposed structure should be considered with the most painstaking care before entering upon the construction of a new building or the remodeling of an old one. Too often a single idea dominates the location. Some thirty years since I decided to erect a large basement barn. The house, a modest, comfortable structure, was located at a suitable distance from the highway, on a gentle slope. To utilize the highway for driving the animals to and from pasture, and to save the use of the fourth of an acre of land and the building of some twenty rods of fence, the barn was located nearer the highway than the house. This necessitated locating the barnyard between the highway and the barn. I never discovered this foolish mistake till years afterwards, when age and study had improved my judgment and opportunity had been given for wide observation and comparison. Now when I revisit the farm it is all too plain as to where the barn should have been located. This large barn made the house appear much smaller than before, and from one approach the farm had the appearance of being untenanted, as the barn hid the house. It is humiliating, but how could I have known better at that time of life, with ideas of barn building inherited and with neither book nor teacher to guide me?
Fig. 94. Too many barn roofs, and too near the house.
Fig. 95. How these barns may be moved and concentrated.
The barn should be located far enough from the house to prevent the aromas of the stables and kitchen from mingling, and at such a distance as not to seriously endanger either one, if the other should be destroyed by fire. If possible, the barn should be on lower ground than the house, that no wash or seepage from it may tend toward the house, and for other sanitary reasons. The lower level will assist to make the barns inconspicuous. One hundred feet is the minimum distance which should intervene between these inflammable and expensive structures, except in a very cold climate, where the house and the barn may be connected by a covered way. See [Figs. 94] and [95]. This way need not be expensive, and should be so constructed that it can be pulled down in a few minutes in case of fire. It need not be high, and the roof might pitch but one way and be composed, in part at least, of glass. If the entire roof was of glass one side of the covered walk might well be used in the spring for growing early vegetables. If the manure be properly cared for at the far end of the barn, good sanitary conditions would be preserved.
The refuse of the stables, if left exposed at the barns in the summer, forms breeding ground for flies, which reach the house if it be near. The substitution of electric street cars, for horse cars which necessitated numerous stables, has noticeably diminished flies in the cities. There should be room between the house and barn for a score or more of large trees, which may serve, in part, to screen each building from the other in case of fire, to shade the walk between the two buildings, and, in part, the barn itself. No tree is better adapted for this purpose than the white elm. The open barnyard should, wherever possible, be discarded, for it tends to increase the wasting of manures and the cost of getting them to the field; to the multiplication of fences and flies, and to unnecessary exposure of animals. Why not substitute paddocks or small fields of a few acres for the wasteful, expensive barnyard? If the animals need exercise they should take it at suitable times in closely-sodded fields, or covered yards, rather than in confined barnyards filled with a mixture of straw, mud and manure. A few acres near the barn might be surrounded with a woven wire fence, which would serve admirably for an exercising yard. The sod on this small area might become seriously injured in a year or two, but the field would be enriched by the droppings of the animals. The field in such case could be plowed and the wire used to enclose another paddock. But it will be many years before the open barnyard can be, or will be, entirely abandoned. What may, and should be done immediately, is to place it at the rear, instead of at the front of the barn, and to cease using it for baptizing manures, and as a storage area for miscellaneous odds and ends. If some change is not made, the farm boy may find a chamber window from which a more restful and inspiring view may be secured than from the one through which he now views daily the evidences of thriftlessness and waste.