The Wayside Inn

A Traditional Cruck Frame and a Hand Raising

2025: Sudbury, Massachusetts 

Our host for this Community Building Project was The Wayside Inn Foundation, a Massachusetts not-for-profit charitable corporation established in 1944 by Henry Ford to own and operate this historic property. Dating back as far as 1702, The Wayside Inn is situated near Sudbury on 100 acres, with nine heritage buildings, ponds, and forest. 

The Wayside Inn is a busy hospitality venue, and they have for some years used a rental tent for larger functions such as weddings. They also have a heritage barn that they are considering for a restoration project to address their need for a large function space. The cruck tent that is the subject of this community build is a phase one project toward the goal of a new event space.

About the Project

The structure is a 3-bay cruck frame designed to be a free-standing temporary structure with a fabric cover. It will be used during the summer months to host functions at The Wayside Inn. The timbers are white pine with natural-grown curves. It's a very traditional frame that lent itself well to the practice of scribe layout, which can easily accommodate natural and curved materials. 

The design of the frame provided opportunities for learning in areas such as curved member selection and conversion, scribe rule layout, cruck frame joinery, and hand-raising methods. Given the traditional English style of the frame, it also features traditional English joinery design and cutting methodology, including handmade pegs.

For this project, we had the use of the excellent facilities at The Wayside Inn. The fabrication area was in the field behind the old barn where the frame now stands.