In 1799, Peter Dunckel built a barn along the road from the Mohawk River to Cherry Valley. The builder had taken an inventory of Dunckel's woodlot and found some very large trees: towering elms, colossal white pines, noble oaks. Trees large enough to build a barn 50 feet wide and 45 feet long. A barn that stood over four stories high. A barn that could be seen for miles.

It's hard to say why Peter Dunckel built a barn so grand. Certainly he needed a place to store his crops and his animals. But perhaps there was more to it than that. It had been barely a decade since the British had swept through the valley, burning nearly every barn in their path. For Dunckel, a veteran of one of the bloodiest battles of the Revolutionary War, it may have been his way of saying, "The war is over, let us prosper." We'll never know.