An 8 barn hoarding pick in the hills of Kentucky
I recently spoke with a guy who was helping an elderly woman go through some barns on her property and help clean them out. Over the weekend, my wife and I took an out-of-state trip down south to look at the eight barns full of stuff. Once there, we met up with the guy and the elderly woman. She told me that her husband had passed a few years back. She said that after he retired, he kept busy building barns and filling them up with whatever he picked up. When one barn got full, he would build another. He had six barns and a couple of sheds on the property, and most all of them were full.
The most unique barn was the main round barn. The woman said that he had imagined it and built it with no drawings, relying only on his artistic and creative imagination as he went. It had quite a unique truss system inside, and the exterior was being finished with half-log siding which, unfortunately, was only about halfway done before his passing.
When they opened the doors to the barn, I knew we were in for a long day. Whatever type of thing you can imagine being in there was in there. It was a bit of a hoarding situation, so there was a lot of junk as well, but mixed in were golden relics of the past like cast iron pots, old tools, glassware, toys, fireplaces, and all kinds of odds and ends from years gone by. We spent hours sorting, digging, and climbing over piles, trying to decide what was worth saving and what needed to go. Every time I thought we were close to the end, we would open another door or move another pile and find more stuff waiting for us.
By the time we finally wrapped up for the day, I realized that my little trailer wasn’t going to cut it for everything we wanted to bring back. I told my wife we’d definitely have to come back with a bigger trailer next time if we were going to do this right. As we drove away, I couldn’t help but think about the man who had spent his retirement building barns and filling them with pieces of his life, and about his wife who was now left to sort it all out. In the end, it’s not just the barns or the things inside them that stay with you, but the people you meet along the way and the stories they leave behind.
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