Circular barns, popular a century ago for their efficiencies of materials, labor and use, have largely left the landscape. One, in the foothills of Virginia, has recently been re-upped for the next 100 years.
Winding east on Va. 230 through the hills of Madison County, you come upon the squat, red barn as it slips into view about a mile beyond Wolftown, Va., perched like a giant red igloo atop a grassy knoll.
The unusual structure is immediately eye-catching, meaning Joyce Gentry, the barn’s owner, receives regular visits from passers-by who want a closer look.
“It’s not in too bad of shape,” says a smiling Gentry, who happily hosts visitors eager for a closer look.
Gentry’s grandfather, Theodore Hoffman, hired a man from Wolftown named Haywood “Tiny” Dawson to build the barn in 1913. Using timber from the farm, Dawson charged $75 for his work; Hoffman paid the fee in installments of flour.
At the time, round barns were in their heyday in the United States, popularized by agriculture experts for efficiencies of material (a circular structure requires fewer building materials per unit of area than a rectangular one), easier labor (farmers could move in one direction as they fed their animals), and structural stability. Dawson eventually built at least two other round barns near Wolftown – another in Madison County, also still visible from Va. 230 a few miles farther east of the Hoffman Barn, and another a few miles south, in neighboring Greene County.
For several decades, the Hoffmans used the barn to house and feed cattle in the circular space surrounding a tall feed silo at the building’s center. As American agriculture became increasingly mechanized and farming methods changed dramatically, however, round barns in general became obsolete, the Hoffmans’ no exception.
Today, though Gentry and her son (sixth- and seventh-generation Hoffmans, respectively, on the family farm) still raise beef cattle, the striking barn serves as storage space – and an arresting reminder of bygone days in rural America.
“What it signifies is the different values that people have had for their land over the years,” says Beth Burnam, a land conservation officer for the Piedmont Environmental Council, which helped Gentry get the barn listed on the state and national historic registers.
The application for listing on the national register, approved in 2009, notes that the Hoffman barn is “emblematic of a different scale of farming, a more local economy, and a way of life where families stayed on their land for generation after generation.”
Last fall, after a century of wind and weather left the Hoffman barn slightly atilt, Gentry had the structure reinforced and repaired for the next 100 years. Fittingly, the man she hired to do the work was one Jamie Dawson, great-grandson of Tiny, the barn’s original builder.
