Work progressing on one of county's oldest barns

Published: Friday, April 12, 2013, 12:01 a.m.

Mike Scoleri figures it'll take a couple of more months to finish rehabilitating the 125-year-old barn, one of Snohomish County's oldest. Scoleri is using vinegar and steel wool to scrub and give a weathered, aged look to the replacement lumber being used in the barn's interior.

The best guesses of everyone who might know figure the barn went up in about 1888.

A European immigrant named Bernard Walther built the board-and-batten structure for his dairy cows. The old-growth Douglas fir he used probably was felled on the property, located in the Snohomish River valley between Lowell and Larimer.

One of the crossbeams in the 40-foot-tall barn is a 60-foot, 12-inch-by-12-inch massive hunk of fir.

Even more impressive is that the barn's posts and beams are held together with mortise and tenon joinery: notches and hand-carved wooden dowel pins. No nails.

"Even when the wind kicked up, you couldn't hear a creak," Scoleri said. "The barn is solid and the men who built it were craftsmen."

Scoleri figures the post and beam arches of the barn were built on the ground and pulled into place by horses.

Arnie Hansen, 66, of Snohomish, grew up playing and working in the barn. His parents, Carl and Lois Hansen, bought the Walther farm in about 1937.

The youngest of three children, Hansen remembers that loose hay was loaded into the barn's loft from a truck driven right into the building.

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Work progressing on one of county's oldest barns