The Leeway Barn

Though this barn is not in the Homestead Heritage Traditional Craft Village, you can get a glimpse of it if you take a Saturday hayride to our Brazos Valley overlook. This large barn came from Ohio and was built about 1870 from oak and chestnut timbers.

As settlers moved west across America from the original eastern states, they came to increasingly open terrain, culminating in the wide open prairies. At the same time, advances in technology were allowing farmers to cultivate larger tracts of land and to reap larger and larger harvests. Whereas the American farm family during the early 1800’s only needed a barn thirty feet by forty feet like our LaRue barn, by the 1870’s they needed bigger barns twice as large, like this Leeway barn at forty by sixty feet.

We now realize the fallacy in this idea of bigger is better. As technology transformed farming machinery and methods, the American family farm has largely vanished, and with it, the way we live, think and obtain our most essential things like food and clothing.