An Amish Barn Raising: 12 Hours In 2 Minutes (Time-Lapse Video)
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.
co-operation
I love this video. It demonstrates the beauty of community and co-operation. My (English) Nephew, has Amish friends and helps the Amish community doing various favors for them with his heavy equipment, such as burying a horse, for example. He is like part of the community. He’s not Amish by any means but sort of associate Amish. When he needed a new roof on his old farm house, the Amish sent over a crew of men who removed his old roof, replaced some damaged roof deck, and applied new metal roofing, all in one day. My Nephew only spent for the materials and pizza for lunch. Just a beautiful community relationship. This was Williams County Ohio by the way.
Great example, Geo. I just looked up Williams County OH as I wasn’t familiar with it. I didn’t see it in Joe Donnermeyer’s latest Amish settlement listings – could it be possible that your nephew’s area is the Amish community near Hicksville, Ohio in the county just south (Defiance)? I visited there once and though it is small, it might be that they have people living in Williams Co. as well. Friendly folks from all my interactions, both there and with Hicksville “expats” in other communities. Or, Hillsdale County, MI to the north has several settlements, maybe there is some spillover into Williams Co. OH from there.
Conversion
I’m interested in becoming schwartzentruber Amish