DUNGENESS — With frames, rafters and planks of well-aged old-growth timber, many iconic barns of the Sequim-Dungeness Valley’s past today gloriously display a majestic air of rusticity beneath the Olympic Mountain skyline.
While time has been good to some of the valley’s barns, others slowly fell to gravity, weather and unintended neglect, a stark reminder of the area’s once-rich, long-faded dairy farming history dating back to the 1860s.
Many are 80 to more than 100 years old and carry the names of pioneers families: Chambers, Cline, Clark, Pettett, Spath, Haller, Dickinson, Balch/Fasola, Brown/Hopf/Keys, Spoelstra, Robb.
A number of barns have fallen to the developer’s bulldozer for residential or commercial subdivisions. Only grainy black-and-white photos remain.
The Willis Chambers barn is the oldest still standing, built in 1890.
Once a part of the Wayside Farm, today the Chambers barn is home to Olympic Cellars winery on U.S. Highway 101 near O’Brien Road and Old Olympic Highway.
Others sit not far from prominent East Clallam County roads surrounded by wheat fields, such as the William Dick barn built in 1916.
The big red structure with a white roof and trim along with three cupolas can be seen at Kitchen-Dick Road and Old Olympic Highway. It is now part of the Gene Adolphsen Farm.
In Sequim, prominent but dilapidated barns sit abandoned, covered by moss and surrounded by encroaching commercial and residential development.
The Balch/Fasola barn can be seen at the U.S. Highway 101 eastbound exit to South Sequim Avenue.
The barn, owned by the Fasola family, was built in 1908 by Augustus William “Gus” Balch.
The Hyer barn, built between 1917 and 1925 with the farmyard complex, is less visible on Grant Road on a hillside north of 101, west of River Road.
Barns with strong profiles, high steep-pitched roofs peaking at 50 feet and covering10,000 square feet or more, are reminders that dairy farming once dominated the Dungeness Valley’s economy.
“Every one of these barns, if they could talk could really tell some stories, ” said Bob Clark, born and raised as a farm boy on his family’s Dungeness farm on Clark Road.
“Barns are a feature unto themselves,” Clark said, recalling the days when he helped milk the family’s Jersey herd by hand before milking machines were invented.
Clark’s sharp-as-a-tack memories keep local historians honest and helped him become the first Sequim-Dungeness Valley Museum board president.
Clark and artist-historian Cathrine “Cat” Bennett, who in 1994 moved here from Los Angeles to live in the historic Matriotti house that once had a dairy barn of its own, spoke to more than 80 attending the third Friday Peninsula College and the Museum & Arts Center of the Sequim-Dungeness Valley lecture series at the historic Dungeness Schoolhouse.
Her lecture, “Barns and Farms: Then & Now,” presented a photographic history of Clallam County’s farming history.
Seeing old barns within eyeshot of her home and realizing how they are tied to the land, Bennett said she decided to preserve them in photos, many of which she photographed and documented on her website, www.dungeness barns.com, between 2005 and 2010.
“I wanted to capture the essence of their barn-ness,” she said.
She said the first dairy cows came south from British Columbia in 1860.
By the 1920s, she said, dairy farms still dominated with about 6,000 dairy cows feeding on pastureland and hay.
“Which was one cow for every two people in the county,” she said.
Bennett said history shows that East Clallam County lost more than 7,400 acres of farmland to development in the 1980s and 1990s.
The winter of 1996-1997 was known as a “barn killer,” she said, because of heavy snows followed by heavy rains that weighted down the snow. Many rotting, weakened old barns collapsed under the pressure.
Clark remembers at age 5 joining his family and other Dungeness-area farmers at the then-new barn erected by Joshua Elliott Cline, for whom Dungeness Bay’s Cline Spit is named.
“When they built that barn, they had a barn dance on the shiplap timber loft,” Clark remembered.
“Everybody in the community was there. There must have been 250 people in that loft.”
The barn dance included an orchestra at one end of the loft, he said.
“Barn dances were a tradition around here, especially when they were first built,” Clark remembered
Surprising some, Clark said most barns were built by one or two people — either by the farmer or a contractor — and barn-raisings did not exist.
Cylindrical feed silos above ground were not the norm, although a few remain scattered around the valley, some outliving their adjoining barns.
Most farmers dug pit silos with open ends to drain the hay and chopped green feed stored for winter cattle feeding.
The Clark family’s barn is 48 feet tall and was built for about $2,300 in 1922. It was the third barn on the Clark farm, he said.
The barns were built for dairy cows and held up to 450 tons of loose hay, and the larger ones held from 35 to 40 cows.
Many barns burned because loose hay would sometimes spontaneously combust, Clark said, with the wind loft created by the intense fires lifting the roofs up 100 feet.
“In the early ’30s, milk went to all the local creameries,” he said, adding that the milk was used as pig feed.
Urging people to slow down and appreciate “these old beauties” of the valley’s past, Bennett said, “It wasn’t until I studied them that I realized how tied to the land they are.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Jeff Chew can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at jeff.chew@peninsuladailynews.com.
