A barn raising is an event during which community men come together to assemble a barn for one or more of its households, with the support of women. The event was particularly common in 18th- and 19th-century rural North America. In the past, a barn was often the first, largest, and most costly structure built by a family who settled in a new area. Barns were essential structures for storage of hay and keeping of horses and cattle, which in those days were an inseparable part of farming. The tradition of "barn raising" continues, more or less unchanged, in some Amish and Old Order Mennonite communities, particularly in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and some rural parts of Canada. The practice continues outside of these religious communities, albeit less frequently than in the 19th century, in the U.S. states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Wisconsin.
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A certain amount of preparation is done before the one to two days a barn raising requires. Lumber and hardware are laid in, plans are made, ground is cleared, and tradesmen are hired. Materials are purchased or traded for by the family who will own the barn once it is complete.
Generally, participation is mandatory for community members. These participants are not paid. All able-bodied members of the community are expected to attend. Failure to attend a barn raising without the best of reasons leads to censure within the community. Some specialists brought in from other communities for direction or joinery may be paid, however.
One person, who is often paid, is in charge of the barn raising. Older people who have participated in many barn raisings are crew chiefs. On the whole, the affair is well organized. At most barn raisings, the community members have raised barns before and approach the task with experience both in the individual tasks and the necessary organization. Young people participating physically for the first time have watched many barn raisings and know what is expected of them.
Only certain specialists are permitted to work on the more critical jobs, such as the joinery and dowling of the beams. (Post and beam construction is the traditional method of construction in barn raisings.) There is competition for these jobs, and they are sought after. Differentiation by age and gender leads to men doing the heavy work on the barn, women doing equally heavy work providing water and food, the youngest children watch, and older boys are assigned to fetch parts and tools.
In earlier American rural life, communities raised barns because many hands were required. In areas that were sparsely settled or on the edge of the frontier, it was not possible to hire carpenters or other tradesmen to build a barn. The harsher winters gave more urgency to the matter of barn construction than was present in the relatively milder climate in much of Europe. Similar conditions have given rise to similar institutions, such as the Finnish one of 'talkoot'.
Barn raisings occurred in a social framework with a good deal of interdependence. Members of rural communities often shared family bonds going back generations. They traded with each other, buying and selling land, labor, seed, cattle, and the like. They worshipped together. They celebrated together, because cities were too far away to visit with any frequency by horse and wagon. Despite traditions of independence, self-sufficiency, and refusal to incur debt to one another, community barn raisings were a part of life.
Churches were considered as important to communities of the 18th and 19th centuries as were barns. In like fashion, they were often constructed using unpaid community labor. There were important differences. Churches were not constructed with the same degree of urgency, and were most often built of native stone — a more durable material than the wood of which barns were made, and more time consuming to lay. Barns, once completed, belonged to an individual family, while churches belonged to the community.
Barn raising as a method of providing construction labor had become rare by the close of the 19th century. By that time, most frontier communities already had barns and those that did not were constructing them using hired labor. Mennonite and Amish communities carried on the tradition, however, and continue to do so to this day.
Group construction by volunteers enjoyed something of a resurgence during the 1970s, when houses, sheds, and barn-shaped structures were constructed for all manner of purposes except the keeping of livestock for a profit. Echoes of the tradition can still be found in other community building projects, such as house building and renovation carried out by Habitat for Humanity.