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WASHINGTON — Crews began moving an iconic but out-of-use white barn on the side of Washington County Road G36 to Kalona Tuesday morning, crawling slowly along back roads and highways for the two-day, 17.3-mile trip.
With dimensions slightly wider than some of the roads underneath, the barn was pulled by a truck bearing “oversize load” markings, flanked by Goodwin Home Moving employees walking alongside it as the building inched through the countryside on streets closed for its passage, including G36, Highway 1, Highway 22, and a handful of gravel roads.
“We’ve worked on this for so long, and to actually see it moving, it’s just, it’s actually unbelievable,” said Washington County historian Michael Zahs. “I kept looking, ‘Is it moving, is it standing still?’ And I’ll be that way until it’s on the foundation, probably. But it’s exciting, it’s exciting for the whole community.”
Zahs was one of several advocates for the relocation, which saved the long-standing building from demolition. In a successful pitch for $300,000 in emergency funds from the Washington County Riverboat Foundation last year, he told board members the barn wasn’t especially unusual, but a typical structure that many families would have had when it was built sometime around the turn of the 20th century.
That made it the ideal structure for historic preservation, Zahs said as he watched the barn slowly take a corner from G36 onto Spruce Avenue, a gravel road headed north.
“I think it’s exciting for the whole state, really,” he said. “To see something that is an ordinary barn, this is what people grew up with around here. And that’s why it’s important to save it.”
The meticulous relocation effort saved the building from demolition, and will facilitate a much-anticipated set of agriculture-centric exhibits at the Kalona Historical Village, long eager to showcase the county’s rich history of farming.
While any formal displays are likely years away, representatives said the building would be on the grounds and possible to enter during the annual Fall Festival in September. Also on the to-do list are reroofing efforts, and possibly repainting the at-least century-old wood.
“People will probably be able to walk into it and at least see the inside of it,” said Kalona Historical Society Managing Director Nancy Roth. “But it’ll be quite some time before … exhibits and stuff. That is going to take us years, and a lot of fundraising.”
While the roads were closed to make way for the barn, many nearby landowners gathered on the sidelines to watch the spectacle, either from a distance at closed intersections, or from ATVs rolling across adjacent farmland, not yet in the planting season.
Some observers said the methodical relocation process looked precarious, to the untrained eye. Roth was among them.
“I’m very nervous,” she said. “I didn’t sleep real well, lots of butterflies … but hopefully it’ll go smoothly. I have all the faith in the world in these guys over here, they do this all the time.”
Chris Reighard, owner of Goodwin Home Moving, oversaw the relocation. He said he was the family’s fifth generation of building-movers, and had been in the business for 30 years.
Minutes before the truck fired up Tuesday morning, he said he had no doubts about the crew’s ability to get the barn from rural Washington County to Kalona in one piece. But he had his fingers crossed on avoiding complications with tight corners, traffic control and power lines along the way, which had to be temporarily elevated or removed by local utility companies to allow the massive building’s passage.
“Sometimes you run into snags with the power company, or maybe some tree limbs, but nothing that can’t be taken care of,” he said. “We usually move like, one a week. This is kind of the first one of the year, just because it’s been so cold.”
By the end of day one, Reighard said everything was going according to plan.
Day two moved along at a brisker pace, with the barn making it across the English River and past the four-way intersection of Highway 1 and Highway 22 by 10 a.m., according to footage posted by the Kalona Historic Village on Facebook.
“It’s just slow,” Reighard said at the end of the first day. “The first gravel roads were pretty narrow, so it took a while to get through those. And once we got on a little wider roads, we could go a little faster … I think it went pretty good.”
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Washington County, Iowa, Washington, Iowa