Experienced Guild members and aspiring timber framers came from all over the U.S. for a Fall barn raising in northern New Hampshire.

Over a ten-day period, Guild members and volunteers built a traditional New England-style timber framed barn, which will serve as the Gateway Visitor Center for the State of New Hampshire. The building will showcase activities of the U.S. Forest Service; exhibits will help employees of the U.S. Forest Service communicate their mission in the White Mountain National Forest and to provide information about the region to travelers. The Guild has worked in this forest before, in the reconstruction of the Dolly Copp Pavilion in 1996.

The building was built from logs supplied from the National Forest and sawn in June at Garland Mill by volunteers on a fine old pre-(Civil) war water-powered sawmill. The design of the barn is patterned after the Gould Farm Barn, but it's smaller, with only four bents, raised as walls, common rafters, and no joists.

This event was structured as a combination Workshop and Rendezvous. Project coordinator Curtis Milton joined the instructional team of Darryl Weiser, Chris Gunn, Tim Whitehouse, and Bob Smith to teach the Square Rule layout system, one of America's principal contributions (along with the boring machine) to timber frame technology. There were abundant opportunities to learn more about rigging and raising techniques, and to experience the joy and power of a community barn raising.

Workshop Participants

Workshop participants came from the ranks of timber framers with little to no experience at all. For a modest tuition, students saw their skills rapidly progress throughout the week, both in hands-on timber framing with traditional hand and simple power tools, and in the larger arena of working as an integral part of a large team.

As always, the Guild's educational goals were to ensure participants' familiarity and comfort with the safe and efficient use of traditional and contemporary timber framing tools of all sorts, to impart a broad understanding of square-rule layout and assembly techniques, and to give a glimpse of the transformative power of collective action in a timber frame barn raising.

Conclusions

All participants were provided with meals and a comfortable spot to camp near-by. This is usually the best time of year to be in New Hampshire since the summer people, and most of the bugs have left, and the leaf peepers have not yet arrived. The unseasonably hot weather was a challenge, as was the rain on one of the raising days.

From Executive Director Joel McCarty: "By all accounts, the Gateway Visitor's Center event was a success: 14 students, 10 days, 10,000 board feet of timber, 35 TFG volunteers and a total of 70 for Raising Day. .. In general, it is fair to say that a good time was had by all, no one got hurt, and the building is up in fine shape -- and we even had enough time for significant ornamentation. Let's do it again, real soon."

As Tim Whitehouse comments in Ask the Experts elsewhere on the Guild site: "I am very happy the focus remained on teaching throughout the event. At NMH, I worked and did not interact with many students or faculty. Not as rich an experience. The success of the event is measured in the enthusiasm of the students. We could not get some of them to leave the site at the end of the day. They were willing to work long hours to finish this building. They had invested themselves in the project."

And from Darryl Weiser: "It was our last evening to be together. The task we had set out to accomplish was largely complete; just down the road a new timberframe barn glowed impressively, lit from behind, standing alone against the night sky. Earlier that day our numbers had declined, although some who had meant to go stayed anyway. But we weren’t quite finished being creative and having fun together. So we celebrated each other and our collective accomplishments by giving of yet another kind – to the scholarship fund that will help those future participants, who have great interest but limited funds. As we look back across the ten days preceding this celebration, we should consider that a multitude of wonderfully successful events and exchanges had taken place, leading up to this happy ending. Of course some moments were hopelessly human, or comic! But in the end even Wednesday’s cold wind-driven rain, when contrasted against earlier days of unrelenting heat, fit perfectly into ‘the script’."