June 6-7, 2025, HBFF Tour & Annual Meeting
Ruzewski ‘Split Barn’, a Standard Barn built in 1868; split and enlarged in 1917. Both dates appear on date stones.
You are invited to join the Historic barn and Farm Foundation for our 2025 Barn Tour and Annual Meeting in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, on Friday and Saturday, June 6 and 7. Located on the Allegheny Plateau in the highest part of the state, the rural landscape of Somerset offers sweeping vistas, historic communities along the Glades Pike and the Forbes and National Roads, and well-preserved farm sites in the uplands, valleys, and hollows of the county. We will visit log and frame barns in this historic community, exploring aspects of form, construction, and decoration which are characteristic of the region. A prominent feature of the tour will be the fascinating turn-of-the-century practice of ‘splitting’ existing frame barns to enlarge them for expanding dairy operations, a barn-building method unique to Somerset County. This tour draws on decades of research by Somerset resident and HBFF member Fred Will into ‘Split Barns’, sawn fretwork ‘Barn Stars’, enclosed forebay ‘Storm Sheds’, and other regional characteristics which contribute to the distinctive vernacular architecture of Somerset County.
Registration on Friday afternoon will be at the Somerset Historical Center, a rural history museum located four miles north of the town of Somerset. This Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission facility features an open-air collection of rural buildings and a recreated 1830s farmstead with log ground barn, as well as interior gallery display of regional artifacts, a library, and museum store. The Annual Meeting and banquet will take place in the social room of a nearby Presbyterian Church. The Friday evening program will include an illustrated talk by Fred Will on his research of barn building in Somerset. Copies of Fred’s 2024 book, Split Barns & Barn Stars of Somerset County, PA and Much More! will be available for purchase.
The Saturday bus tour (via charter coach bus) will visit seven barns located within a five-mile radius of the town of Somerset. Sites on the tour range from two early nineteenth-century double-crib log barns to a Sears & Roebuck ‘Already Cut’ trussed roof barn built around 1920, and will include three examples of split barns. Our lunch venue will be the beautifully preserved 1896 dairy barn of the Robert Huston family, which displays artifacts of the agricultural, mining, and distilling activities of this local landmark farm.
Further details and forms for tour registration will be included in the Spring 2025 Forebay Post. We look forward to seeing you next June!