From New World Dutch Barn To Slate Valley Museum

    From a New World Dutch Barn, the Slate Valley Museum emerged. The barn, which dates to about 1840, may have some parts that date to as early as the 1700s. This has been determined by the design of the nails in its oldest timbers. It was expanded in size around the middle of the nineteenth century. New World Dutch Barns, built in a region dominated by grain farming, provided housing for farm animals and acted as facilities for threshing and storing grain and hay. Dutch Barns are distinctive because of their shape, arrangement of interior space, and H-shaped structural frames which serve as the central core.

    This particular Dutch Barn was previously located in Ravena, New York. The Blue Circle Cement Company generously donated the barn to become a part of the new museum. It was dismantled piece-by-piece with hand tools and hauled to its present site in Granville, New York, on land donated by the estate of Hugh G. Williams, a descendant of a slate baron. Here it has been reconstructed into the remarkably beautiful main exhibition space of the Slate Valley Museum.

    In 1996, the Museum won a Preservation Award from the Washington County Advisory Board on Historic Preservation for the reconstruction of the Dutch Barn.