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November 14, 2008

Old barn gets second life

By Brian Ojanpa

MANKATO — Most people’s recycling efforts end at cans, bottles and the occasional large appliance.

But Mark Johnson always has bigger fish to re-fry: He dismantles and restores old buildings and has been since 1987.

“We were green before it was in vogue,” says the owner of Terrasol Restoration and Renovation of St. Peter, who has restored 30 to 40 old structures over the years.

His latest endeavor is a circa 1900 Mankato barn that will be reincarnated on an organic vegetable farm at Northfield.

Open Hands Farm owners Ben Doherty and Erin Johnson became enamored with vintage restored structures when they visited friends who were turning an old granary into a cabin.

“We were struck by the uniqueness of the building and the simple wisdom of reusing old wood instead of newly cut timber,” Doherty said.

The farm owners’ desire to minimize their ecological footprint led them to research restoration companies, which led them to Johnson.

A phone call was made, and Johnson quickly discerned where they were coming from.

“They wanted to shy away from the typical Menards tin pole barn kind of thing and use something more in keeping with their philosophy,” Johnson said.

He told them he had just the barn in mind, and the project took off.

Johnson’s crew took about 10 days to dismantle the barn and stack the piles in his rural St. Peter yard.

Johnson had purchased the barn from Jerome Haefner, who has since moved to the Brainerd area.

The structure, which sat along North Victory Drive near Home Depot, originally was used as a horse barn, then converted to a chicken barn in the 1940s.

The dismantled barn will be trucked to the Northfield farm, where Johnson and his crew will re-erect it, with Doherty and Johnson providing their own sweat equity.

“We like to work hard and we have lots of friends willing to help,” Doherty said. “The barn is going to fit our needs really well.”

He said the barn will be used to shelter vegetables and as a pickup depot for customers, and its weathered wood will be stained red.

Doherty said acquiring the structure and having an old-fashioned type of barn-raising is a pie-in-the-sky daydream come true.

“And we look forward to it having maybe another 100 years of usable life,” he said.

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