In 1799, Peter Dunckel built a barn along the road from Fort Plain 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. 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, now we shall prosper." We'll never know.

What we do know is 200 years later its roof was breached and its massive structure was in danger of collapse. It had become a liability to its owner, who wanted it sold and moved off the property. And so its parts, now numbered and catalogued, were loaded onto a flatbed truck and driven eighty miles southeast.

After a year of intensive restoration, the Circa 1799 Barn was resurrected on the edge of a 50 acre field. There it stands as a testament to the hard work and skill of the men who built it. To stand within it is to stand within the sweep of history.