What do you do when you get a call saying you have to fix your 130-year-old barn that is falling down and causing a hazard to your neighbors?
You grab some friends, some beer, some food, and some love and figure it out.
In today’s exciting episode, Jill Davis and Emily Chase Smith talk about the hardship that came when Jill had to say goodbye to the family barn at the family farm. After having been in the family for 130 years, taking down the barn was an incredibly emotional moment for Jill and her family. Her brother perhaps surmised the emotions best:
“It’s like we’re burning down dad.”
Come along with your favorite drink and hear about the emotions, logistics, and history that came from taking down a 48,000 cubic foot barn.
If you have a story about farming, ranching, or growing up in rural America, we want to hear your story and help you share it! Those stories are what bring us hope in difficult times. Get in touch with Jill at The Storytellers Porch website at https://thestorytellersporch.com/apply/ or send us an email at thestorytellersporch@gmail.com.
Thank you joining us on The Storyteller’s Porch this week! Make sure you subscribe and follow us at https://thestorytellersporch.com/, https://podfollow.com/the-storytellers-porch, or on your favorite podcasting platform so you don’t miss a single story with us on the Porch. We’ll see you next time where we’ll be sharing more personal stories with collective impact. What drink will you bring?
Always drink responsibly, don’t drink and drive.
Check out the full transcript here:
Mark Packard: these are the stories we share around the dinner table. Tell in front of the campfire and listen to on our porch. This is a place where tales are told and stories are heard. Grab your tea, your cocoa, your wild Turkey whiskey, your wine. Welcome to season two of the storytellers. Where we will be hearing tales of the farm with your host and storyteller, Jill Davis
Jill Davis: Welcome to the storytellers porch. I’m your host, Jill Davis. And I am back on the porch today with my friend, Emily Chase smith. Emily. Thanks for going along on this adventure with me,
Emily Chase Smith: it is, I hear we’re about to have a serious adventure today.
Jill Davis: This is where things change. This is the beginning of the changes.
I just got back to the farm. Cause I spent a lot of time out on this little farm that I have in Kansas. And whenever I’m there. Sometimes I feel like I’m 1942. Sometimes it feels like 18 89, 19 62, but it never, ever feels like 2022, which is when we’re recording. It just never does. And I get back to the city, which is only three hours away.
And yet it feels like I’ve time traveled. It’s the strangest thing.
Emily Chase Smith: I could totally see that. And especially like when you’re churning butter, it’s really hard to place yourself in history.
Jill Davis: I do not have a butter churner. I ever have a butter churner
of the things we’ve done recently is planted tree line out at the farm. And I had to carry water, like only like 10 feet. I had to carry water. Cause my hose did not reach quite far enough. And I thought, can you imagine in my mind, I was just thinking about them hauling water before they had a well, like where, and they did have a well, and they still had to haul water.
It’s just out of my mind, comprehension,
Emily Chase Smith: I’m totally reminded of that jungle book. I must go to fetch the water till the day that I am grow. Remember that, that girl.
Jill Davis: Water feel, even more precious to me when I’m out there. And that’s why I am drinking fresh water on the porch today. And my guess is you have water with me as well
Emily Chase Smith: all the time,
Jill Davis: all the time. Exactly. The farm this time out there. I was at the museum, the Cheyenne county museum, just little plug for the Cheyenne county museum of Cheyenne county, Kansas.
It is one of the most fascinating museums I’ve ever been to. And I’ve been to a lot of museums too, simply because it’s so detailed for such a small section of the world. They have filing cabinet after filing cabinet, after filing cabinet of stories of different people in the area. And I was talking to the main person there.
I don’t know that she would call herself a curator, but whenever I have a really deep question, they call her in. And she and I were talking about her husband, who is in his eighties. he told the story about when he was a little tiny person. Before they had a, well, they would have to haul the water in and they would roll it uphill from the river because obviously they go down to the river.
This is the Republic river in Cheyenne county, Kansas. They go down to the river, fill the barrel with water and then roll it up the hill. And so if they were to say I’m thirsty, they would get a teaspoon of water because the plants needed and the crops needed the majority of the water.
Emily Chase Smith: Wow.
Jill Davis: And we talk so much in our history now, knowing our world.
Now, now that it’s 20, 22 about, you know, stay hydrated. I’m always telling my grandkids, have you hydrated today? Are you hydrated enough? I live in Colorado where everybody’s chronically dehydrated. Can you imagine being a small child getting a teaspoon of water to satisfy your thirst?
Emily Chase Smith: No. And especially when I think of Kansas and windy and open, . I would need more water than I currently drink.
Jill Davis: Yes. It makes me understand my dad was chronically dehydrated. That was something we fought him all the time, when we were caregiving for him, he’d have a cup of coffee in the morning and that was all he would drink the entire day.
And I’d be like, daddy, just one little sip of water. Just come on, dad. He’s like, I had a cup of coffee this morning and now hearing that story, I understand better why.
Emily Chase Smith: Yeah, it makes perfect sense. Dang.
Jill Davis: And again, that goes back to stories are so important. Understanding that story of a teaspoon of water.
Makes me understand why my dad felt whole cup of coffee was more than enough
to be alright.
Emily Chase Smith: Right? How many teaspoons is that?
Jill Davis: I have no idea. That’s a math course. I don’t
a lot more than a teaspoon. So that’s why I brought my water today is just in, in honor of all those Prairie people, Prairie farmers, prairie, ranchers, who didn’t have access to water like we do now. One of the first things my great-grandfather did out at the farm was to build the well and to put a pump on it.
So they had water from the beginning, but they still have to haul the water from the pump out to wherever it needed to go. And today that’s what we’re talking about, not the windmill, but the barn we spent the last several episodes. In nostalgia, and nostalgia always comes with that sepia tinted photograph where there’s a little warm glow to it, no matter how hard it was, we find a little more glow and we’re going back a little bit in history, but not very far.
This is about the barn out at the farm. And just to recap real quickly in 1886 ish, my great-grandfather Claimed his homestead. He proved it in 18 92, 5 years after he went out there, he built the storm cellar that has GA Henry stamped in it with the number 1886. And we do have pictures of that and it’s still there.
It’s so cool. Then we go forward, to the forties and fifties, when my dad got it, it went out of the family in 1956. Ish was the last time that a Davis or Henry lived out at the farm in Kansas. So it sat there for a long time. And that’s why it sometimes feels like going back in history is because things are pretty much stayed the same until.
November 1st, 2018. And that is the day my father passed away. And it’s such an interesting thing, Emily, how we are in the world. And I know my dad chose that day to pass away because growing up November 1st was a big day in the Davis household because it was the beginning of the new fiscal year for my dad’s company, El Paso floor.
And so it was a little stressful up until that day. , all the PNLs done and ready for taxes and all of that done. And November 1st began the new fiscal year and he passed away at the beginning of the new fiscal year. My dad passed away. I inherited the farm and the farm as we’ve talked about in past episodes had this five-year lease on.
which will never understand it. I swear. Do you ever see those memes where it says, if you could sit on this bench and ask any person from history, one question, what would it be?
Do you know what I’m talking about?
Emily Chase Smith: I do. And I’m laughing that this is going to be your question.
Jill Davis: This is my question. Dad, sit your rear end down and tell me what the heck were you thinking when you put a five-year lease on this farm?
Now the good part of that five-year leases. I just put it in the back of my mind. My dad passed away. My mom passed away. My daughter was graduating from high school, my life, as I knew it had. Changed, even though I didn’t know it had changed just yet. But I had a tenant in the farmhouse taking care of , the little, it’s about five to 10 acres of land that the farm buildings are on.
then the other, I don’t know, what is that? 310 acres we’re taking care of by a farmer and all of that stuff. So I was not worried about it. I knew I had five years, which would have taken me to. November of 2023 and still I got a phone call and that phone call came from the manager of the land. And he called me and said, do you know that barn out there that your great grandpa, now he didn’t say it like this.
He just said, Hey, Jill, that barn’s got to come down because it’s going to impact the crops. But this is what I heard, Jill, you know, that incredibly cool barn that your great grandfather built, that your dad kind of treated as another. Member of his family is falling apart. And now it’s your responsibility to figure out what you’re going to do with it, because it’s going to ruin the crops.
If something doesn’t happen.
Emily Chase Smith: City girl question.
Jill Davis: Yes.
Emily Chase Smith: How does a barn ruin a crop?
Jill Davis: The barn doesn’t ruin props, but if a barn breaks down and comes down unaided, it will fly off into the crops. And those pretty John Deere green tractors that we see running around are not just oh, it’s an $80,000 tractor.
It’s a 250 or a 450 or $650,000 piece of machinery.
Emily Chase Smith: Wow.
Jill Davis: Do not want old 1880s barn wood in it, or the fact that it has a metal roof from about 50 years ago on it, that metal roof will pop off and fly out in there. And it’s just dangerous for the farmer.
Emily Chase Smith: It’s not going to fly in one piece. It’s going to put a bunch of pieces all over the place and be a pain for yourself.
Jill Davis: And the wind will pick it up. It’ll blow it away. And that’s the tip of the iceberg that I know, I’m sure there’s more in depth to it that I don’t understand, but he made it very clear to me that his crops were at risk and I needed to take care of. And I really didn’t want the responsibility of this farm in the first place.
And now I’m being told I have to figure something out and I need to do it in the next three to six months. So although I am a strange from my siblings, I contacted one of my siblings and I said, what am I supposed to do? Did dad tell you anything? Cause he certainly didn’t tell me anything. And they told me that dad wanted me to preserve the barn at all.
And they had contacted somebody who would repair it for me. Then they gave me that person’s number. So I called this farm repair person and he told me we will come out to the barn and we will do our best to repair it. Our starting bid is $35,000 and we can’t guarantee we can repair it.
Emily Chase Smith: Wow.
Jill Davis: So I called my land manager and said, okay, I’m not spending $35,000 on something.
Please remember. I, have , two children at the time in college and I’m paying for that college education or a good chunk of it. And so that was not going to happen, that I was going to, donate $35,000 to this. And this is , in the middle of the pandemic and what am I supposed to do?
So I call my land manager and he said, well, I’ve called the fire department. They’ll come out and do a clean burn for you for a donation. And if we can work it out and all of this, I’m like, sure, that’ll be fine. Let me think about it. He said, and of course you can always dismantle it. If you want to jail, it’s yours to do with what you want to.
We’re going to go into July 4th, 2020. I am at a party with a friend of mine and he and I are talking to a group of his friends cause it’s his friend’s party. And as we’re talking about this barn in Kansas, that I’ve inherited. I mentioned to one of the women there where it’s located, she goes, oh my gosh, I grew up just 20 miles from.
Emily Chase Smith: Wow.
Jill Davis: This is a teeny tiny little town in the middle of nowhere, just over the Kansas, Colorado border. She grew up on the other side of the Kansas Colorado border in Colorado. So we start talking about it. She’s like, dang, I would love some of that barn wood. People want barn. And then there may or may not have been a few bud lights involved at this.
Emily Chase Smith: I just about anything that happens after bud light.
Jill Davis: Exactly. And a few whiskey shots and maybe some other alcohol going on and we don’t always make our best decisions under the. I was not under the influence, but all of the men at the party work, and these are all men who come from the trades. So they’re construction they’re plumbers or electricians, they’re general contractors.
And they said, Hey, we’ll take the barn down for you. That sounds like fun.
Emily Chase Smith: Sounds like fun.
Jill Davis: And I’m like, I don’t think it does.
Emily Chase Smith: How many bud light will it take to keep you thinking? That sounds like fun.
Jill Davis: I will be happy to furnish as much bud light as it takes to make it fun. And so then I started making phone calls and I’m trying to find out how to get a permit to burn this burn down.
What I found out is permits for not required, just be safe and don’t do it if there’s a burn ban.
Emily Chase Smith: Okay. So we just need to pause here and I need to know the size of this barn, because I roughly know that this is a large barn that you can burn this thing down and nobody needs to know about it. It’s kind of amazing.
Jill Davis: I don’t even know how to tell you how big it is, cause I’m not good with me. But I will tell you when I stood next to the barn door, which is one half of the first story and I’m five foot four, barn door is about 10 feet and that’s about half of it. So 10 20, probably 30 to 40 feet high.
Emily Chase Smith: Okay.
Jill Davis: And about , 40 feet square, like 40 feet this way, 40 feet. That way, yeah. So 40 by 40 and then 30 feet high.
Emily Chase Smith: Wow. Okay.
Jill Davis: Huge
Emily Chase Smith: What’s in it.
Jill Davis: So that’s what was interesting is there’s not being very, very little in it. There’s very little in it. And my guess is the tenants who are there went in and cleaned it out of their things because they knew I was coming to check it out.
There were some old doors and some old windows and we pulled all of those out. And that was about it. Interesting. Okay. Yeah, there was very little in there., my boyfriend and I, we went out there and we, took a look at it. We examined it and he’s like, oh, this is going to come down. No, but lights involved at this point, but they’d chosen a date.
And one of the men in this group was very adamant that we could take it down. I guess they watched like a bazillion YouTube videos on how to take down the barn.
Emily Chase Smith: You gave them the adventure of a lifetime?
Jill Davis: Well, that’s what they always said is who actually gets to tear down a barn.
You guys do so over labor day weekend, they took their holiday weekend, came out to the barn and started dismantling the barn. We started out pretty easy and we’re just like, okay, we’ll take it down. Everybody is a little unsure of what to do, because like, there’s this great big barn and how do you take it down digitally?
They ended up cutting down some of the main points. So the roof fell down and then they wrapped a chain around it, pulled it out. It was quite complicated.
Emily Chase Smith: Wow.
Jill Davis: We ended up renting a skid loader from. Someone in the community. Cause I started making phone calls, trying to find one. Nobody told me we needed big equipment to do this.
So I have a shovel.
We ended up digging, a great big hole in the middle of the pasture next to the barn. And we put all of the barn wood or whatever we didn’t keep. took. , so we did this great big hole. We filled it up with a large majority of the barn wood and we burned it and it was scary to me because it’s Kansas.
But somehow for those three days there was zero wind.
Emily Chase Smith: Wow.
Jill Davis: The wind did not blow at all. And we hooked a hose up to the pump that went to the well, and we kept it tended and we kept it down and we let the hose run all night on the fire. And by the next morning, so on the morning of the fourth day, the farmer said the barn is down.
And it was completely down. Now we did take two flatbed trucks. Full of Barnwood to different homes in different places for art projects and that type of thing, but he was down and it was hard and I cried. And I cried and I cried and I cried. It was a hundred and I dunno, five degrees, but it felt like 190 degrees out there.
And my brother was with me and my older brother is 74, I guess he was around that at the time. And he was the only one who ever lived at the farm. And he was there for two years and I didn’t realize the emotional impact of tearing this barn down. And so my brother kept coming to me and say, You know, Jill, it just feels like you’re burning dad down.
And I understand his pain. It hurt. It was hard for him. And it hurt me to hear him say that. So it’s a very emotional weekend, so emotional, and they’ve never been able to think the 10 men who came out there and that couple of women who came out there to help me the 10 or 12 people who are out there to make this happen.
I do not think I can say thank you enough for what they did. And I find it interesting now that I’ve been out at the farm a little bit more, that no one in the neighborhood came by to check on us. There were no permits pulled because you don’t pull permits. Nobody can check in on us. Nobody was concerned about it because they just knew that we were doing the right thing.
, and it changed the whole skyline and the corn crop was only maybe 10 feet away from the barn. And we didn’t damage one corn stock in the town barn. Yeah. They were very proud of that. So as I, and I have videos of this being done, and those will be on our storytellers porch, Facebook page that show the burning of the.
And Emily, it was dramatic and intense and so much must have happened in that barn. Over those hundred and 30 years at that barn stood. And one of the things that happened, my father was a very religious man. His faith was very deep his faith in a Christian. God was very. I do believe things happen for a reason.
I also think sometimes we, as humans have to make meaning out of everything. It’s how we understand the world. And at the end of the barn burning in the corner of the foundation that still stands. Two pieces of Barnwood had fallen to form cross. And so I have that cross at my house. Eventually it will go out to the farm, out to the barn and I have painted on it.
The Henry Davis barn, 1890 to 2020.
And I think it’s just a really good reminder though, of how life changes and how I stays the same. We don’t have any stories of that barn going up. There is nothing in any history book, even though I’ve gone through all the history records at the Cheyenne county. There is nothing in any individual book that I have been able to find the talks about the building of this barn.
My grandfather would have still been, single when it was built. He married, my great grandma Josephine in 18 94. So he would have still been just him building this barn. I believe a community would have come along. And helped him build it, but there’s no stories about it. You know, there were dairy cows there.
When my dad was growing up, we know that the Moffitt’s rented the barn from my grandmother and they had dairy cows in it. We know that the tenants of the farmhouse had goats in it for awhile. But I wonder what other stories there are. There’s so many history books out there about Kansas. don’t know if it’s still required in every English class, but did you read John Steinbeck
grapes of wrath.
Emily Chase Smith: absolutely
Jill Davis: It’s one of the rites of passage. I can’t drive down a road and see a turtle on it without thinking of the grapes of wrath and the dust bowl of Kansas. . A lot of people have recently read the book by Kristin Hannah. The four winds.
Emily Chase Smith: I actually have read that. It wrecked me.
Jill Davis: You were one of the people who recommended it to me. why didn’t wreck you Emily.
Emily Chase Smith: I thought it was interesting that you mentioned the grapes. I think that the grapes of wrath as a California book, because out of the dust bowl of Kansas, they landed here. Right? So it’s funny. I don’t even think of it as a Kansas book. I think of it as California book. And to me, the four winds is basically an expansion of what life was like here for people who, were, mean, gosh, looking for work and food and somewhere to live.
And I think it was just this one thing to know about abstract. It’s another thing to have, a very well-written.
Jill Davis: I could not actually get through the book.
Emily Chase Smith: Really. That’s unlike you,
Jill Davis: it’s very rare for me not to be able to read a book.
I have a feeling in three or four years as it settles in a little bit with a farm in Kansas, all be able to read it, but I’ve been so immersed in my own family’s history. I just couldn’t. You know, Who knows if maybe there’s some history book out there somewhere that talks about the raising of the barn.
I’m currently reading a book called under a full moon. The last lynching in Kansas.
Emily Chase Smith: Ooh.
Jill Davis: It’s by Alice K. Hill. And it’s about the last lynching in Northwest Kansas, in Cheyenne county, Kansas.
Emily Chase Smith: Wow.
Jill Davis: And so there’s so many books that have been written about this little tiny part of the United States and a very small part of the world.
And so I wonder, you know, how many of those stories. That are based in truth, reflect in some way, the way the barn was built. I do believe it was a Scandinavian era area. There were a lot of Swedish people in that area. My grandfather was Irish top to bottom, but his good friend was Swedish.
And so I know there was a barn raising of some sort. You could not build a barn up. Enormous size without help. because I make meaning out of everything because we as human do Personal stories with the collective impact. What I want to leave us with today is that concept of community.
The community that I had and I get teary-eyed. When I talk about this, the community that came out and helped me tear down that barn was not even my community. It was my friend’s community. But they came and they helped and they supported, and they did it for a couple of cases of bud light, a little bit of whiskey and dinner out at the local Mexican restaurant.
And so community still exists. And I believe that when we have community, we have hope so as you listen to this, and I know Emily, you have community,
Emily Chase Smith: I do.
Jill Davis: And having community makes all the difference, doesn’t it?
Emily Chase Smith: It does. And it’s interesting that community both built the barn and laid it to rest for lack of a better word.
Jill Davis: Oh, I love that. We’re going to start talking about the burning of the barn is laying the barn to rest
Emily Chase Smith: yeah, needs to have almost a human ending.
Jill Davis: Yes, it does. It served very well. It was a wonderful place. I think for a lot of people’s lives, raised cattle, raised, goats, raised all sorts of things.
So. People could live in the barn was laid to rest through community. And so that marker feels even more real that, we’re marking a place. And now the fun part about the barn, the foundation that 130 year old foundation concrete foundation still is there. And a gentleman uses the pasture land.
The barn is on the pasture land for his cows. And so the cows wander over the. Foundation on a regular basis during the time that the cows are out in the pasture and it just feels fitting in, but it’s still being traversed by cattle.
Emily Chase Smith: Do they like lay down? Is it cool?
Jill Davis: It’s they don’t lay down on it. It how do I say this in a polite way?
Right. So there is a lot of leftover. Material the barn foundation, because I don’t think the goats were ever cleaned out from, does that make sense? It’s kind of smelly. It’s not as smelly now because it’s all dried out, but the cows just kind of walk around it and climb over it and don’t spend a lot of time on it and they do lay down around the foundation.
, but it doesn’t provide shade. It’s just there and the county. Near it. And I do have pictures of those really cute cows on the website and on the Facebook page. It’s a matter of fact, one of our porch pets this season, Emily is a cow named Hazel and she is a brown little calf who wandered through that to foundation.
Oh, So as we complete today’s time on the porch, as always, I’m grateful to have you here with me, you helped me to clarify and not have that language, which I still don’t really speak farm. I sometimes I think of myself as Oliver Wendell Holmes, the third in a girl suit. For those of you who are too young to remember green acres, he was a gentleman farmer.
I am not even a gentlemen farmer. I just like living out there and visiting on occasion. And it is a community that brings us hope and hope and community are what get us through difficult times. So I wish for you, my listeners today, our listeners, that you find a lots of community and with that, all the hope that you need to get to the days that we’re in.
Here at the storytellers porch. We believe we are the stories. We share stories of the barns stories of the city, your story, keep living it and meet us next time here on the porch and be sure to bring your favorite drink.
Emily Chase Smith: Bud light. This is not an ad,
Jill Davis: but you could sponsor me if you want it to.
Mark Packard: To learn more about this season storytellers and to catch past episodes of the storyteller’s porch. Visit us at the storyteller’s porch.com to make sure you hear every exciting episode with Jill this season. Subscribe and follow us on apple podcast spot. Stitcher and wherever you hear your favorite shows, we’ll see you next time here on the porch at the farm where I’ll be drinking, iced coffee and occasionally some wild Turkey whiskey.
What drink will you bring?
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