Cool video. Amish in Vernon County, Wisconsin put up a barn over the course of twelve hours – condensed into a two-minute video. This time-lapse clip from 2016 shows the whole thing go up, interspersed with some still photos. Video at the bottom (credit Milwaukee Journal Sentinel).

This barn is 32 x 48 feet in size. There are about 30 men working on this project.

The other interesting thing here is the story behind this barn-raising. The barn was built for an English man named Leslie Cast, who lost his previous barn in a storm. Cast in turn gave the men free use of the barn for an entire year.

I assume Cast paid for materials, with the Amish contributing the labor. Is that a good deal? I have no idea what a year’s worth of barn rent costs, but I have to think both sides were satisfied. In any case, the Amish helped out an English neighbor in a time of misfortune, so kudos for that.

The barn-raising is one of those classic activities we associate with the Amish. But as the Amish have changed how they make a living, fewer are dairy farming nowadays – at least as a sheer percentage of the overall Amish population.

So in some communities, the big barn raising is not such a common thing anymore. In other places where dairying remains important, you can assume Amish would remain more familiar with the practice.


This isn’t the first such time-lapse barn video we’ve come across here. We previously saw a much larger barn go up in 200 seconds in the Kenton, Ohio community. But no matter the scale, the barn-raising never fails to impress.

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