Louis Wierenga Jr. was sitting with his right foot up, resting a sore toe, when my husband and I arrived at his Hastings, Mich., farm in late October. 

Still, he quickly went to a bench near the back door of the more than century-old farmhouse he shares with his wife, Mary, on Maple Knoll Farm. As he laced up leather work boots, I was awash in memories of my own father doing exactly the same thing, even when his feet and everything else ached from farm work. I lost my dad in 1995. Louis’ dad passed in 2011.

Louis and I share a deep love for farms, barns and nature, and we have a wealth of memories. It was Louis’ grandfather who began renting land on Charleton Park Road in the 1930s. My great-grandfather settled cutover country in the Upper Peninsula in the 1880s. 

Louis is a good steward of the land, active in his community and has earned multiple awards. My parents did the same. Louis and Mary host annual “Hayfield Concerts” to benefit the Hastings High School band. My parents hosted farm tours. Louis was a 2023 Michigan Master Farmer. My parents were 1993 Michigan Farmers Hall of Famers.

There are major differences, however. The cost to repair stone damage to a single combine will likely be more than my parents were paid for the sale of their entire 250-plus-acre farm in 1969, including equipment and livestock. 

With efficiency and innovation, Louis and his late father adapted and saved heritage barns on their farm. Subsequent owners of ours neglected our 1910 barn. A third owner destroyed it.

My husband and I visited on that nippy October day to learn how the Wierengas adapted their heritage barn. In fact, a barn innovation won Louis a trip to Hawaii in 2005 to be shared at a Farm Bureau convention. 

That idea is in use today. The pegged barn is at least a century old, square nails hold the siding, and when his father acquired the land and buildings in the 1960s, it had a standing seam roof. Roughly 82-by-32-foot, including a lean-to on its west end, the barn features a 10-by-10-inch solid top plate hand-hewn from a single tree. Louis figures it is at least 50 to 55 feet in length. 

Once a cattle barn, it had three rows of 12, 8-by-6-foot farrowing pens in its basement, the walls of which are thick, mortared fieldstone. Later, a barn was moved from Yankee Springs and adjoined at the west end. 

“High winds caved in 22.5 feet of the addition’s roof in 2012,” Louis says. “Instead of replacing it, I had the roofline brought down, reinforced, and made it a lean-to with an inside loft, and put on an entirely new roof at less than half the cost of repairing the whole addition.”

The entire structure is now sheathed and roofed in metal. Farrowing pens were removed, and the loft floor was removed to open the barn up for large equipment storage. 

“You can’t remove support without adding it back somehow. Brace. Brace. Brace. Things have to be braced,” Louis emphasizes. 

Salvaged floor joists were nailed together to form cross-beam support, raised high into the barn to be secured sidewall to sidewall, in addition to cabling to both prevent bowing out and sagging inward. 

“We installed the lighting before we put them up to make it easier on ourselves,” Louis notes.

To the barn’s sidewalls, he added strong electrical poles for added bracing, securing them to existing braces and framing. Joists were used on the corners of the barn near the roof to add angled reinforcement.

“When we cleaned out, we found the mice had chewed the covering off old wires, leaving them bare in years of old straw,” he says with a shudder.

The Hawaii trip came about because Louis and his dad had replaced narrow doors at the east end of the barn with 18-foot metal bi-fold doors that they designed, built and reinforced on the inside. Over the doors, a metal overhang keeps out rain and snow, braced to give added strength to the gable-end wall.

A horse barn, which Louis believes to be a Sears Roebuck kit barn from the early 1900s, at one time had a corn crib built onto its east side. That was replaced with a lean-to, braced with electrical poles set in concrete. A granary was reinforced with exterior poles. Its floor was removed for added height. The old buildings, despite the use of metal, are adequately ventilated to prevent moisture problems.

Even back at the main farm where a large metal workshop houses the combine under repair, Louis points and says, “We added bracing along the roof and sidewalls,” he smiles. “We get high winds. The metal isn’t enough to hold it.”

The Wierenga family’s love for the farm and its structures extends to a wood-stave silo, beautifully resurrected on the main farm.  “It was on the ground years ago, but my grandfather put it back up, repaired it and used it. We are about to put a metal roof on it,” Louis says with a smile. With added bracing, no doubt.

Farming on Maple Knoll Farm has changed in the years since my parents were on Coralan Farm.  My dad and the Wierengas would have had a grand time talking farming as well-worn leather work boots awaited lacing up for the never-ending work to be done on much-loved farms.

Arnett, author of American Barns, and founder of the Barn Believers Project Fund, is known as “The Barn Lady.” Contact her at [email protected].