Practical Preservation Podcast featuring Greg Huber of Eastern Barn Consultants

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Greg Huber from Eastern Barn Consultants and Past Perspectives joined the Practical Preservation podcast to discuss:

• How barn styles varied from region to region
• What makes barn construction unique
• The type of barn Danielle had never heard of

We also discussed the services Greg offers documenting barns and researching house histories, the barn tours and seminars, and the books he has written.

Contact info:

Greg Huber, Architectural Historian

610-967-5808

greg@easternbarns.com

Books:

The Historic Barns of Southeastern Pennsylvania: Architecture and Preservation Built 1750-1900

Bio:

Gregory Huber – of Past Perspectives and Eastern Barn Consultants

• Gregory D. Huber is an independent scholar, consultant and principal owner of both Past Perspectives and Eastern Barn Consultants, historic and cultural resources companies that are based in Macungie, Lehigh County, Pennsylvania.
• His special focus is in House Histories and Barn Histories of historic homesteads in southeast Pennsylvania and beyond.
• A student of early vernacular architecture since 1971, Huber has specialized in pre-1850 barn and house architecture of Holland Dutch in New York State and northern New Jersey and Pennsylvania Swiss-German and certain English settled areas of the northeast.
• Huber’s latest book – out in August 2017 – The Historic Barns of Southeastern Pennsylvania – Architecture and Preservation – Built 1750 to 1900 has reached Number One Book on the Amazon Best Seller list in its specific category – Vernacular Architecture
• He is author of more than 270 articles on barn and house architecture and is co-author of two other books and editor of another book – Barns – A Close-up Look.
• He has lectured to more than 225 audiences and led dozens of barn and house tours in several states of the northeast.
• He is available for historic homestead consultation work on old houses and barns.

Voiceover:

Thank you for tuning in to the Practical Preservation Podcast. Please take a moment to visit our website, practicalpreservationservices.com, for additional information and tips to help you restore your historical home. If you’ve not done so, please subscribe to us on iTunes, Stitcher, or SoundCloud, and also like us on Facebook.

Voiceover:

Welcome to the Practical Preservation Podcast, hosted by Danielle and Jonathan Keperling. Keperling Preservation Services is a family-owned business based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, dedicated to the preservation of our built architectural history for today’s use, as well as future generations. Our weekly podcast provides you with expert advice specific to the unique needs of renovating a historic home. Educating by sharing our from-the-trenches preservation knowledge, and our guest’s expertise. Balancing modern needs while maintaining the historical significance, character, and beauty of your period home.

Interviewer:

Of early vernacular architecture since 1971. Huber has specialized in pre-1850 barn and house architecture of Holland Dutch, in New York state, and Northern New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, Swiss German and certain English settled areas of the Northeast. Huber’s latest book, out in August, 2017, The Historic Barns of Southeastern Pennsylvania, Architecture and Preservation Built 1750 to 1900, has reached number one book on the Amazon bestseller list in its specific category of vernacular architecture. He is author of more than 270 articles in Barn and House Architecture, and is co author of two other books, and editor of another book, Barns, a Close-up Look. He has lectured to more than 225 audiences, and has led dozens of barn and house tours in several states in the Northeast. He is available for historic and homestead consultation, work on old houses and barns.

Interviewer:

So thank you again for joining us. How did you get started in preservation?

Greg Huber:

Well, the very beginning of my preservation interests came from my very early interest in the 1970s of trees, forests, and wood. I was just enthralled with that. And I had gone to forestry school. I had bought books on trees and forests, especially the Redwood forests out in California.

Interviewer:

Yes.

Greg Huber:

And from that, I was armed with some knowledge of trees and what they look like, and also an emotional connection to it, in my case, and that led to the connection with old timber frame buildings. And of course these timber frame buildings were made from timber, just the way the phrase sounds, and I made that connection. And so it was just a love affair from the early to mid 70s, I’ve had this. And of course I soon realized that even some of the barns in the mid 70s that I had known were disappearing. One particular barn, a rare stone barn in an area in Southern New York had come down. I went over this hill and I had seen this barn in one particular spot and it was gone. And so that led to my understanding and knowledge and awareness that barns were not permanent. So I started to record them in the mid 70s. And preservation, both house and barn preservation, but especially barn preservation, was paramount in my mind.

Interviewer:

The stone barn that you referenced was rare, was it all stone? Is that what made it rare?

Greg Huber:

Yes. The other barns up that way in Southern New York, pardon me, Southern New York state were framed. They had stone foundations, but above the stone foundation, they were frame up there. But this was a very rare area stone-

Interviewer:

[inaudible 00:04:27] stone.

Greg Huber:

And I never did take a picture of it. Or maybe I did and I misplaced it or something, but in any event.

Interviewer:

Yeah, it’s probably on a roll of film somewhere.

Greg Huber:

Yeah, okay.

Interviewer:

How did you start your business?

Greg Huber:

Well, for many years, I was a contractor, but I wasn’t crazy about the work. It earned me a good livelihood, but I wanted to get into historic preservation on some level. I did not want to work for anybody else. And I didn’t really know how to do that. And then come the year 2000 and I moved from Northern Jersey to Pennsylvania. And I wanted to take a course in historic preservation, and there was a school in Bucks County that offered the course. And that was pretty good. I knew a fair amount of that material anyway. But then I completed the course, did well. And then the next year, I started my contracting business here in Pennsylvania, and I kind of struggled. And then the next year I took a course in documentation. And what that did actually was teach me the why’s and wherefores of doing chains of title or property ownerships.

Greg Huber:

And then after I got back, right after 9/11, from a month’s trip to England, I said, “I’m just going to give my company a name.” And I had all the stationary made out. I had business cards made and then I put an ad in the paper and got a few responses. And so I would do this work in my spare time kind of thing. And that was okay. But then I got the bright idea that I would be a vendor at the Kutztown Folk Festival. And I did, and I got something like eight people who signed up. And that’s what did it. And I told them what I would do. I would do reports on their architecture, on their property ownership, and I did family histories too. So that’s what really started it. And so I’ve been doing it for 16, almost 17 years now, full-time.

Interviewer:

And you do barns and homes, correct?

Greg Huber:

Right. I’ll do it in any historic structure that somebody wants to obtain knowledge of.

Interviewer:

Oh yes, yeah.

Greg Huber:

Yeah.

Interviewer:

Okay. So we kind of talked about, your why of preservation, but what really brought you into barns? Why barns?

Greg Huber:

Well, there’s something about barns that houses don’t have. In the beginning of my interest, I realized that barns had revealed structure. So all these timbers, the roof structure, the bends, the framing units, were revealed. They were out in the open. You could just see them.

Interviewer:

Right.

Greg Huber:

And this intrigued me very much. The manipulation, or the transformation of trees, to timbers, to beams, using a broad ax, using cutting axes, of various kinds, and then transforming into these bends that formed the structure, the skeleton of these timber frame buildings was exciting to me.

Interviewer:

Right. And even if the house is constructed that way, you don’t see it because we cover that up. That is a different way of looking at it.

Greg Huber:

Yes, and there was something romantic about a barn that a house didn’t have. Of course you live in houses. Although I have to say, I don’t know how much of your audience may or may not know, but early on in the 17th century, in the 1600s, the Holland Dutch, I believe some English, and actually even the Germans, and English, in Pennsylvania actually built combination house barns.

Interviewer:

Oh, I didn’t know that.

Greg Huber:

Yes, they actually did exist. And I’ve accumulated as many as 12 references to house barns. Or what’s known in the German language, the German dialect, is einhaus. I think that means one house. 12 of those. And I put that in my book, the book that came out in August of 2017. I make reference to these combination house barns. And if you go over to-

Interviewer:

Are there any still standing that you’re aware of?

Greg Huber:

No. A fellow, Abe Rouan, a friend of mine, back 15, 16 years ago thinks that he knew of one in the Hazleton area in Pennsylvania. But I never saw the barn. I never really made any very special effort. There are some house barns though in existence. There’s one or two in Missouri. There’s one or two or three in Wisconsin. I think this fellow who does some work with that actually knows of about a dozen house barns that are still extant or still existing in North America.

Interviewer:

Oh that’s got to be amazing.

Greg Huber:

And I’ve never seen one of those, but I know of this fellow who still studies them.

Interviewer:

That’s very interesting. I learned something. What do you wish that you knew when you started that you know now?

Greg Huber:

Well, my exposure and my knowledge of these buildings is far greater than of course back 40 years ago, 45 years ago when I started. But everything is a learning curve. Everything is, pardon me, is a learning curve. And one thing I wish I had done early on, and again, this comes back to the learning curve, is that I wish I had recorded barns. It takes awareness to know exactly what to record, and how to record it, but it was more of the how to record. And I would have done it much more stringently. I’ve even learned just in the last three or four years of when I go out to the world at large and I take photos, and I come back and I put these digital photos on my computer, how I would categorize them and put them into certain folders, and files in particular ways.

Interviewer:

So they’re easier to find, that makes sense. Yeah.

Greg Huber:

Yeah, yeah. And I just didn’t realize that. And even five years ago. I wasn’t aware of how to do that. And I’m still learning.

Interviewer:

Right.

Greg Huber:

And maybe you can hire somebody to say, “Well, when you go out and you do this, you do this, this, and this and this and this.” And of course I’ve never spent the money to hire someone to know the absolute best way. But I’m learning, and just the job of labeling these things is a tremendous amount of time. Let me just say this, I take breaks and I look at Netflix and that’s a wonderful time to actually… I can divide my screen into one, the digitalized photos, and the other one, Netflix, and I can do this with the photos. I can categorize the photos while I’m looking at Netflix. And it doesn’t take that much concentration. So it’s that kind of thing. It’s organization.

Greg Huber:

And I see a lot of buildings during any typical year. In June or July, I’ll be going down to Virginia. A fellow contacted me who knows of a number of early buildings in the Shenandoah Valley. And I never knew about this. And it was postulated that there were no pre-1850, not 1750, but even 1850 barns, in the Shenandoah Valley and that’s completely wrong. So I go down there, I may take 500 or 800 or a thousand photos. And I come back, I can’t possibly, unless I had a secretary, or an office person to do that, I can’t possibly label all those. So that’s just an example, but I’ll treat that differently than a trip that I may, say out to Franklin County in Pennsylvania, that I did in 2011. So anyway, that’s the kind of thing that I wish I had done much earlier on. And those are just digital photos. So those don’t even focus on the non-digital photos.

Interviewer:

Yes, yes, yes. And, and I’m thinking too, I know that as you get exposed and you meet people, and you talk to them, and you learn things, I find that some solutions we would offer even five or six years ago are different than what we would do now, because we’ve learned things. And I think it’s better to be working with people that are willing admit they don’t know everything and are willing to learn, than somebody who says their way is the only way.

Greg Huber:

When I do my reports and there’s something that I observe, or experience, or something like that… I did a job toward the end of January, out in Cumberland County, and I had never seen this feature. I had never seen this feature. Okay. In the many thousands of barns that I’ve been in, I’ve never seen this feature. And I openly admitted. The guy followed me out to his barn and we were looking around and I was taking notes and measurements and all that. And I said, “I’ve never seen that.” I told him that, and it wasn’t a big deal. He accepted it. He didn’t slash my throat or anything. It’s not that big a deal.

Interviewer:

It isn’t.

Greg Huber:

I think what people are looking for in any kind of business is your enthusiasm, your sincerity, and just your honesty about what you’re doing and everything. And I think people deep down know that you can’t know every imaginable thing.

Interviewer:

Yeah. I agree with you. So tell me about your barn history reports.

Greg Huber:

Well, what I do when someone calls me and I go over the particulars, give them a price and everything. I go out to their barn.  It could be a half a mile away, or it could be 200 miles away, which is what I’ve done. I’ll go out to a barn site and I will get a general lay of the land. I don’t do site plans necessarily because that involves a lot more work, more than they’re willing to spend. But I get a general idea of the site plan, where the barn is in relation to the house. And I get an idea of that. And then I will, in relation to the approach lane, in relation to the main road, and all that. And then I will look at the exterior of a barn. I’ll take down many measurements, notes about the exterior. Is it made of stone as it made a frame, as it made a brick?

Greg Huber:

And then I’ll go into the interior and go from the top, the rafter system, the roof support structure, all the way down to the basement. And just take a lot of photos. I’ll probably typically take anywhere from 60 to 125 photos of the outside of the barn, and the inside of the barn, and see what I have. And then I will go back to my office at my home and put all these things together. I don’t do this with house histories, house architectural examinations, but I do it with barns. I will include a glossary of barn terms. I just instituted Saturday, for the first time in my Barn News and Events newsletter, a glossary of terms. I should have done that before, but better, late than never.

Greg Huber:

You can’t always explain everything in an article, what a purlin plate is, what a canted queen post is, or that kind of thing. So I have this glossary of barn terms now that people can refer to. And any barn history will include anywhere from about 1500 words to maybe 3 or 4,000 words. It depends on the level or the in-depth look at, or research that they want me to do. And the longer the length of the report, the more information will be offered.

Interviewer:

And since you were saying that they’re different lengths, are they somewhat customizable when you’re working with your clients?

Greg Huber:

Well, yeah. Every barn is different. I don’t care where you go, even if the same builder built a barn, and he’s going to do a few things differently. So yeah, they’re very much customized. I tell everybody. I had a potential client one time about 8, 10, 12 years ago. And I was sitting at their dining room table, going over some of the things of a barn history. And the woman looks at me and she said, “Don’t you get bored with this?” And I was amazed, no one had ever said that to me before. I said, “No, all these buildings are unique.” They certainly have repeatable features.

Interviewer:

Right, they’re similar, I got you.

Greg Huber:

And it’s these features that are repeated, that allows me to understand when buildings were built. And that’s one thing I didn’t mention before, that I can go into a house or a barn, and just from the architecture itself, 90% of the time be able to tell the age of construction within about 10 to 15 years, the actual date. So I can do that.

Interviewer:

Yeah. And I know from my experience, that’s hard to do if you’re in a different region than you’re used to being in too. Because there were variations regionally. And I know that in Lancaster, they say we were until probably the 1900s, we were 10 to 15 years behind where they were in Philadelphia. So wherever you are, you have to know the region.

Greg Huber:

You have to make an adjustment. That’s correct. Yes, that is correct. But still, I feel confident enough that I’ve seen… And this is the truth, and it may not be 100% true, but I feel competent that I could go anywhere in North America and tell a building construction date within 10 to 15 years, I did that out in California-

Interviewer:

Based on the construction? Yeah.

Greg Huber:

Yes. On the micro features and the macro features. I went out to California in 2008, and I went along the coast, and there were a number of barns out there. And I spied on one and I approached the owner, he said, “Sure you can go into the barn.” So we went through the barn, he had a number of relatively early tools and everything. And I told him the date of construction. And I can guarantee you within about 95% chances, I was right on with that. And it’s not a big deal. If you look at enough buildings and you can make comparisons.

Greg Huber:

And it really does get involved… In my book, in the barn book, I have a chapter on construction elements, and that had never been done before, which I’m very happy I was able to do that. But no book that I know of in North America now, another maybe in Europe rather, that has been treated to some degree. But as a full size book and everything I’ve never… And I did another book. A book on Dutch American barns, back in 2001. That’s the year that that came out. And I get into that to some degree. But with this book, I really get into some quite fine details. And I could have even gotten into more details. So when you look at enough buildings-

Interviewer:

Yeah, sometimes it’s hard to-

Greg Huber:

I’m sorry?

Interviewer:

I was just thinking, sometimes it’s hard to not include everything when you’re trying to pare down for sharing your information in a book.

Greg Huber:

That’s exactly right. Yeah. You have to be very discriminatory and you have to be very selective. And I think I was able to do that essentially. It’s going to help a lot of people anyway, in any event. Sometimes people call me anyway, and they say “What can you tell me about my barn?” Because a book can only go so far, it’s a good general indication of certain kinds of things. So, yeah.

Interviewer:

Okay. Very good. Well, how can our listeners contact you?

Greg Huber:

Listeners can contact me. What they should do, is they should email me. I think the best way to do this is to email me at Greg, G-R-E-G, at eastern barns. Just like the direction and barns, an S at the end of barns. Some people don’t do that. Greg@easternbarns.com. And I have all this information, my telephone number is there, my PO box is there, and they can easily contact me and let me know what they would like to do. And that’s really it. I have a website, easternbarns.com. I also have a house website, so to speak, past, P-A-S-T, dash perspectives.com. I have that website. And so it’s easy to get a hold of me.

Interviewer:

Okay. Very good. And I will make sure that those are on our website too, so people can find you easy. If they’re listening to it later on. Then did you have any offers for our listeners, any events that you’ll be presenting or where to purchase your book?

Greg Huber:

Yes. On the Barn News and Events newsletter, there’s all kinds of announcements, at the very end of it I have a separate section called Barn Events. And you can look at that. I have, I think seven or eight, barn events coming up. Two barn tours, we have one barn tour in Birch County, in Albany Township, that will be offered in the beginning of May. Although that may be filled up at this point, I’m not sure.

Interviewer:

Okay.

Greg Huber:

And then we have another county-wide barn tour that’s being presented and sponsored by Berks History Center in late September of this year. And these are bus tours. And I’m going to be scheduled with four or five or six barn talks. One barn talk I’m going to be very interested to present is Barn Decorations and Mystery Marks in York County, in York, Pennsylvania. That I’ve done this before, I’ve done similar things to this before, but I’m formulating a whole new PowerPoint presentation. So there’s a number of things that are coming up.

Interviewer:

Okay. Very good. And to sign up for your newsletter, is that on your website or should somebody email you to get on the list?

Greg Huber:

No, they should email me on that. I have not incorporated the newsletter on my website yet.

Interviewer:

Okay. Very good.

Greg Huber:

The link to my website is on the Barn News and Events newsletter.

Interviewer:

Okay. Very good. I will make sure that we have your email and your website, both websites on our website, so people can find you easily. And if anybody’s interested in signing up and hearing more about barns and taking the tours or sitting in on any of your lectures definitely make sure that you email, Greg. Thank you again for coming onto the podcast. And I hope you have a great day.

Greg Huber:

Okay. Thank you, Danielle.

Interviewer:

Thank you.

Voiceover:

Thanks for listening to the Practical Preservation Podcast. The resources discussed during this episode are on our website, at practicalpreservationservices.com/podcast. If you received value from this episode and know someone else that will get value from it as well, please share it with them. Join us next week for another episode of the Practical Preservation Podcast. For more information on restoring your historic home, visit practicalpreservationservices.com.