Your Old Barn Study

Nominated for the ACO Public Education and Engagement Award for the collaborative project to document and raise awareness about Ontario’s threatened old barns

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Ask a 7-year old to draw an old barn and you’ll get a red building with green gambrel-shaped roof from Old MacDonald’s Farm. Country or city kids, the same result. Yet across the province, barns are disappearing through urbanization, scavenging, neglect, obsolescence and vandalism. No one knows how many still stand and which ones are significant and deserve saving. Old barns are in crisis.  

Founded in 2019, non-profit Ontario Barn Preservation (OBP) is the only provincial organization committed solely to the leadership of saving old barns. One way is preserving them in the virtual world through OBP’s software Your Old Barn Study (YOBS), designed to capture valuable data on construction, significant features and wonderful old barn stories. This might even allow future architects/engineers/historians might recreate virtual barn tours. 

OBP’s innovative idea is to train a small army of owners to document their own barns, using simple educational tools and smartphones/computers to collect and send searchable information to a central database. Partnering with the University of Guelph’s History Department, over two years OBP directors and six U of G experiential course students created YOBS. Barn owners became census takers, answering 50 questions about their barns with explanatory photos and menu choices. OBP believes YOBS may result in one of its most significant methods of saving old barns. Although only dozens have thus far been studied, the ball is rolling.

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