It’s Not Even Past

Linda Burton posting from Arkadelphia, Arkansas – A fifty-foot board? Have you ever heard of such a thing? Old timbers from old trees, from back in the days before pines were harvested from quick-grow pine plantations. Trees grew tall and unmolested, till it was time to build a barn, or a house. The fibers were dense, impervious to the ravages of time. That is why Tim Kaufman’s barn may be one of the sturdiest structures in all of Clark County today. I’m standing at the end of those fifty-foot lengths of board in absolute awe, listening to murmurs from my picnic-mates, who are walking inside the barn, and climbing up into the loft, equally awed. Charlotte Jeffers wangled the invitation for the Clark County Historical Association to come out to Tim’s property on Old Military Road for a summer-evening picnic and a lesson in historic preservation. We’re at the Rosedale Plantation Barn, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. It’s a “historic barn” all right, coming from a plantation that was established in 1860.

The preservation part is this: Tim Kaufman, a dentist by profession in Arkadelphia, was interested in barns. He and his wife bought some acreage on Old Military Road a few years back, set up housekeeping in a trailer, and began looking around for old log structures that nobody seemed to care about any more. The Rosedale barn, located elsewhere in the state, was about to be demolished. Tim bought it, carefully disassembled it, tagging each board with a tiny metal marker in a sophisticated numbering system; and moved it to a sweet little hill at the edge of the woods on his land. Leggos, take note. Each board originally was notched and fitted together with the precision of a Roman building an aqueduct; it was meant to last. Tim and his crew painstakingly reassembled the barn exactly as it was before and I’ve no doubt it will stand another 150 years. The barn is 35 by 50 feet, believed to be the largest log barn in the state, a hand-hewn nailless beauty, a marvel preserved. What Tim did was a testament to visionary thinking. But that’s not all Tim-with-a-vision has done. » read more