The end of the barn

By Jack Brummet, Green River Valley Editor

It was bittersweet today. The barn at my mom's house in Kent finally had to go. My dad bought the barn when I was about five years old. It came from about eight blocks up the street, where people had kept a horse or two in it. In about 1959, my Dad bought it when that house was sold to make room for a Big Bear grocery story in downtown Kent.

One of my first memories is of that barn traveling slowly down 4th Avenue to our house on 4th and Crow Street. I was about five, and actually remember that I was watching Howdy Doody on TV when the barn came into sight. It became my dad's workshop, and my Webelo group's meeting room. We made root beer and soap in there, and my dad and his pals cooked up their batches of home brew there. It was also lapidary central, where my father polished and cut the rocks and gems we found on our various rock knocker/pebble puppy trips and expeditions--obsidian, moss agates, jasper, opalized cypress wood, jade, morrisonite, fossils, and other rocks we found and dug up. He built at least three dinghys in there with his friends, as well as our home-made camper, my pinewood derby cars, cub scout genius kit constructions, and many other projects. My father would die in the garage, not totally unexpectedly, of heart failure, in 1964, a few months after JFK expired. It was moving, but not sad, to see it come down today.

Like a lot of barns you see as you travel in the hinterlands, it was not a beefy structure, and like many of those barns you see, it began to sag and lean in the last few years. I tried to find someone who wanted to recycle all that fine 100 year old shiplap and first growth beams and timbers, but I could find no takers. So, alas, we had to have it taken down. My brother Guy shot this video of the first moments of the demolition. And so it goes. . .

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