Upper Arlington Public Library

The Barn Builders

An Architectural Legacy in Ohio’s Rural Landscape

Ohio University educator, Tom O'Grady, shares how the barn builders have left an architectural legacy throughout rural Ohio that can help one understand much about the heritage of the region.

Culture groups migrating from New England, Middle Atlantic states and from the South settled in various regions of Ohio, and their distinct farms and barns can be observed when travelling throughout the state. The geographic distribution of the various barn types is due to routes followed into the state, geographical influences, or cultural affinities. In any case, one can identify regions settled by people of Pennsylvania German descent, those settled by migrants from the upland south, or those migrating to Ohio from New England by the type of barns and other buildings on farmsteads remaining on Ohio byways. These artifacts of timber frame construction house the remnants of Ohio’s primeval forests.

Tom O’Grady sailed as a deck worker on an ore carrier on the Great Lakes aboard a sister-ship of the fated Edmund Fitzgerald, surveyed for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, launched the first comprehensive curbside recycling program in the state of Ohio and has been promoting waste reduction and sustainable economy for thirty years. O’Grady has also been an instructor of Observational Astronomy in the evenings at Ohio University for thirty years. He has spent a good deal of the past twenty-five years as a student of Ohio history researching its geography and settlement, the mound builders, Ohio canals, and several of its interesting characters and their stories.

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