Jule Goeller remembers her family’s hog barn south of Pilger as a large, indoor world of adventure where she played basketball with her siblings in the haymow, with piles of hay serving as cover during games of hide-and-seek. The barn that sat unused most of the year came to life each spring. Goeller and her two sisters would climb between the wooden rails of the rickety fence surrounding the structure and struggle with their combined might to push open the barn’s sliding double doors.

“We would peer inside, and then scramble up the ladder into the loft. At the top we would hear the sudden flapping of pigeons as they took off and stirred up little puffs of dust,” said Goeller, who lives today with her husband, Len Dickinson, on a farm between Wisner and Pilger that belonged to her great-grandparents. Goeller and Dickinson founded Sand Creek Post & Beam in Wayne in 2005 to emulate the magnificent Nebraska barns of their youth.

“In the dim light we would gingerly search through the hay, sometimes following a faint mew until we found Buttermilk’s litter of newborn kittens. After a few weeks she would move her brood out of the barn and it would once again become the stoic relic of what once was, made richer by the joy of three little girls who loved kittens and grew up cherishing memories of that old barn.”

Early homesteaders were challenged with raising a barn before the onset of winter, and they used what was at hand – limestone in the southeast, blocks of sod in the heart of the prairie and native wood where available. With a barn often being the first structure built on a new homestead, pioneer women living in sod homes, dugouts or crude cabins often complained in letters to eastern relatives that their animals lived better than they did. Sometimes those families chose stalls for themselves and lived with their animals in the barn while a proper home was being built. The tongue-in-cheek question, “Were you born in a barn?” may not have been funny to the early Nebraskans who were.

Horses – previously the most important implements of a farm – were largely put out to pasture with the advent of tractors and other machines beginning in the 1940s. A place to house the animals and their food supply became less necessary, and cattle and hay bales were just fine outdoors. Many barns became personal storage units, and with other chores being more important, barns often were not maintained. As old-timers say, once you lose the roof, the barn will begin leaning not long after.

With barns being so important to agriculture in Nebraska’s early days, it is no wonder that the structures are part of our state’s folklore. One legend tells of a Kearney County farm wife who didn’t appreciate her husband’s pair of round barns. The story goes that he spent so much time in the barns, and not with her, that she harbored a disdain for the buildings. She didn’t mind when a tornado took one of the barns in the 1950s. After her husband died, she supposedly paid to have the other barn burned to the ground.

Rancher Dick Tracy had a fiery passion for his country, the Sandhills and his wife, Susan. The Tracys tore down the old house on the historic G.D. Marsh Ranch after purchasing the spread west of Bassett in 1993. But they saved the barn.

The couple shored up the interior, and added new doors, windows and paint. When it came time to top off the project with a new roof, Tracy, a Vietnam War veteran Marine, didn’t opt for the usual drab shingles. He ordered red, white and blue.

“We lived in town, but he liked going out there to get away and work with our black Angus herd,” Susan said of her husband, who died in 2014. “Like our barn, he was red, white and blue to the core.” She recently had the barn roof recovered in the same patriotic color scheme that has stopped motorists along U.S. Highway 20 for roadside photos for more than a quarter century. 

Grand Island photographer Kathy Chase recognizes that Rock County barn. The structure is one of more than 250 barns she saw through her camera’s viewfinder during a five-year mission to photograph barns in each of Nebraska’s 93 counties. She completed her quest in 2017. Continued road trips to photograph favorite barns in other seasons and different light have led to discoveries of more barns, pushing her number of Nebraska barns photographed to 500 and growing.

Chase appreciates when owners add coats of paint or new roofs to aging barns, but for photography purposes, she prefers the rustic look. She grew up playing in her uncle’s barn near Gothenburg. That barn, and others she has captured on camera, are no longer standing. Chase now shoots barns to save them.

“People love barns for different reasons, and they sometimes see more in photos than I do. Barns remind people of grandma, grandpa or simpler times,” Chase said. “They remember hard work, loft adventures and the smell of hay. Memories of barns past and present are a historical harvest that will stand even when the Nebraska barns that inspired them are gone.”