Workers make family's old barn new again

The old barn on Jan Rule's family farm west of Belleville probably needed to come down intentionally before it came down accidentally.

But she said she wasn't ready to just abandon it. So she found a couple of guys willing to salvage the pieces and build her a slightly smaller building on the grounds of her new venture, Stillpointe Wellness Retreat at 2135 Dorothy Drive off Town Hall Road.

Eric Beck and John Summers, of Belleville, have taken apart the 100-year-old building and are putting it back together in a slightly smaller size a few yards away.

"They call themselves barnstormers," Rule said. "They are great guys."

She said the barn had become a hazard.

"Pieces were starting to come off in high winds," she said. "It was just these posts sitting on a sandstone foundation with nothing holding them on."

Beck said he loves working on old buildings such as this 22-foot-by-50-foot barn.

"A lot of guys would just have bulldozed it down," he said. "We took it apart, board by board. It was a lot of work. But it's been fun. We found all sorts of things."

That included cedar shakes that covered one side, old tools inside the barn, lots of old square nails and wooden beams held together by pegs.

"The widest board was about 17-and-a-half inches," Beck said. "You can see the piles of lumber all around here. We're running out of room. But we want to save it. They don't make lumber like this anymore."

Rule said her dad, Clarence Voellinger, was able to identify the old tools and tell stories about the barn.

Beck said they were digging deep to find buried treasure, but Voellinger assured them it had been searched for before, and no one found anything.

"The things we found, we'll use them to decorate inside and out the new barn," Beck said.

He showed off an old, primitive work table complete with cubbyholes. He said that was the type of thing he could take to an antique show down in Texas and get a lot of money for.

But this one will stay with the property and go into the new barn, he said.

Rule said she doesn't know what the space where the barn used to be will be used for. But the new barn, made with the old lumber and decorated with the old things found, someday might become an instructional exhibit for school kids.