Metcalf Barn
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Robillard Barn (Metcalf Barn)
1908. VT 58, 1 mile west of VT 14
George E. Metcalf decided to expand his seventeen-cow dairy herd shortly after inheriting this one-hundred-and-seventy-five-acre farm on the Brighton Brook and Black River flats in Irasburg from his father, Freeman Metcalf. In 1908 he hired local builders to construct this seventy-five-foot-tall round wooden bank barn that is eighty-four feet in diameter. With an interior-trussed conical roof and a round ventilator cupola atop a central interior silo, the barn is a good ex ample of the standard design Franklin H. King developed at the Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station in 1888 and promoted in a popular college agricultural textbook. Here local builders adapted King's design as a bank barn and avoided the later patented roof and framing designs that bedeviled many farmers in the Midwest with claims for royalty payments. Of nearly a dozen round barns built in Orleans County before World War I only a handful survive. Thanks to the stewardship of the Robillard family, the Metcalf barn is the best preserved.
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Location: Irasburg, VermontRegional Overviews:Styles:no metadata availableMaterials:
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Citation
Glenn M. Andres and Curtis B. Johnson, "Robillard Barn (Metcalf Barn)", [Irasburg, Vermont], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/VT-01-OL18.
Print Source
Buildings of Vermont, Glenn M. Andres and Curtis B. Johnson. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013, 243-243.
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