File talk:Old Barn at Brookwood Farm MA 04.jpg

Hello, I stumbled on this image of what is described by a Mr. James Woodward as an English barn. The image is actually of a circa 1900 addition and a second building that was moved and bumped up against that addition about 1950. A proper 18th century English barn was attached to the L shaped structure you see in the photo up until April of 2009 when the North Bennet Street School carefully disassembled it and moved it to their shop for a complete restoration. The Department of Conservation and Recreation, a Massachusetts state agency is working with North Bennet's Preservation Carpentry program to undertake this restoration which is expected to take at least another year before the barn returns to the farm. Many of the hand-hewn timbers of the barn were badly rotted and damaged buy insect infestation. Students this past fall of 2009 spent a few weeks at the farm hewing newly felled white oaks into the replacement parts for the floor system such as sills, a summer beam and floor joists. Prior to this activity a the farm, Instructors studied the remnants of the original timbers to carefully locate and layout the joinery and tool marks. Students were shown how to duplicate the very same "Scribe Rule" method of joinery layout using levels and plumb bobs. These future preservation carpenters were shown how to use felling and hewing axes to turn logs into timbers in the manor used over two hundred years ago to produce the parts of the original barn. As of this writing, students are replicating gun stock posts and splicing sections of top plates for the barn.

Steven O'Shaughnessy Dept Head - Carpentry / Preservation Carpentry North Bennet Street School

Preservation1 (talk) 18:28, 24 April 2010 (UTC)