It was the rusty old hinge that did it, carefully wrapped and placed under the family Christmas tree. Jim Campbell, then an architecture student at the University of Manitoba, laughed when he opened the unlikely gift. "Gee, thanks," he said. "Very funny."
"Wait a minute," said his brother. "There's something else attached to that."
Something else turned out to be a dilapidated barn standing on a site a few kilometres from the 1870s homestead near Duntroon, Ont., (about 20 kilometres south of Collingwood) that Mr. Campbell inherited from his father and grandfather, and where he still lives with his wife Suzanne and their two young daughters.
With the help of a local builder and artist, Don Miller, who, Mr. Campbell says, "taught me everything I know," the young man took the old barn apart piece by hand-hewn piece and re-erected it as his studio.
That was 10 years ago, and it marked the beginning of his love affair with what he now calls "crappy old wood."
Not that he was any stranger to old wood. Mr. Campbell had been working with it for most of his life.
"My dad would take down a wood shed and we would build a new one from leftovers, old hydro poles, found materials, whatever was lying around," he says. But until the hinge and Mr. Miller came into his life, he viewed all those weathered boards and beams as little more than recyclables.
"Don Miller made me see it as more than just material," he says. As the two men dismantled the old building, Mr. Campbell learned the structural principles that went into holding the barn together. "Don taught me the joinery," he says, and helped him to appreciate the simple intricacies of post-and-beam construction.
Today, the still-boyish 43-year-old architecture graduate (and owner of Rockside Campbell Design Inc.) is something of an expert on barn construction, with dozens of barn and barn-conversion projects under his belt.
There's nothing new about turning barns into houses. But Mr. Campbell has taken the exercise a step further than the somewhat predictable chintz and wagon-wheel conversions that were popular in the 1970s and '80s.
One blisteringly hot day this summer, he agreed to take me on a tour of some of his projects in the rolling hills south of Collingwood, an area where my husband and I recently bought a century farm.
Before we start out, I ask him to take a look at our own barn, a crumbling monolith that is gradually being reclaimed by the weather and the weeds. To my surprise, he declares it structurally sound.
Shafts of chaff-laden sunlight penetrate the cavernous space as Mr. Campbell runs his hands over 18-inch-thick pine beams that he says are likely about 130 years old. He can tell by the axe marks, uneven gouges where the round logs were hewn by hand into square beams, some of them more than 60 feet long. By the 1880s, he explains, sawmills were operating throughout the region and the huge logs would have been milled mechanically.
Above our heads, high up in the rafters, hang two notched wooden discs, each about four feet across. Mr. Campbell identifies these as "rack lifters," giant horse-powered winches used, in the days before hay and straw came in neat round bales, to lift the bed of the wagon off its base high into the loft where the hay was forked by hand into the mow.
Now, as Ontario's old barns gradually deteriorate and disappear, these rural artifacts sit in silent testimony to a forgotten era.
A few kilometres to the west, Mr. Campbell has helped to preserve and transform a barn much like ours into a weekend haven for Jim McPherson and his wife, Dawn. This particular barn began its life on Mr. McPherson's grandfather's farm near Paris, Ont. Last year, the Toronto lawyer had the structure dismantled and moved in its entirety to a property he owns near the village of Creemore. With Mr. Campbell's help, Mr. McPherson has re-erected it as a monument to his grandfather's memory and his own youth.
