Landmark Door County

Landmark twin barns near Superior will be bulldozed and burned

SUPERIOR -- In their prime, the stately twin barns north of town housed tons of hay, draft horses, dairy cattle and other farm animals and equipment.

That was in the early 1900s.

Today, the pair looks like they've been tossed high into the air like toys, then allowed to crash to the ground.

The metal roof of the north barn is caved in like a giant wave. Window and door frames are popped open, and gaping cracks show in the concrete foundation. Holes in a side wall make it easy for hundreds of barn swallows to fly through.

The south barn is in better shape, said Jason Ray, who bought the twin barns and 320 acres of land about five years ago.

"We moved here when I was 6 weeks old," said Ray, who is 34 now and works as a farm manager at Central National Bank in Superior, a town of about 2,000 people on the Nebraska-Kansas border.

His parents, John and Marsha Ray, rented the place from Langer Family Farms for 30 years, and Jason and his younger brother, Justin, used to play in the twin barns when they were kids.

 "I've never seen one like this," Jason Ray said, when asked about the rarity of twin barns. "I'm sure it's not the greatest design."

The barns have no big wooden beams, and instead of vertical siding -- popular with the architectural design crowd -- they've got not-so-sought-after horizontal siding.

"The foundation is only 3 to 6 inches underground,"  Ray said. "It's amazing it withstood a hundred years."

The twin barns were doing as well as could be expected until last month, when a "gustnado" hit the north barn, Ray said.

Long before the Ray boys, Judy Schott and her sisters played in the barns, too. Their parents, Glen and Frieda Langer, moved onto the place in spring 1943.

Glen "Pidge" Langer later bought the farm. A former Nuckolls County commissioner, Langer got his nickname because he liked pigeons as a kid.

Schott recalled jumping off a high beam into mounds of soft hay in the loft of the south barn, trying to tame farm kittens and hosting slumber parties inside.

"We had a wonderful time," she said. "Two girls slept on three bales of hay."

The two barns were connected by a granary, but Schott said she never played in the north barn because it was used for pigs.

"I was devastated," she said recently after she saw the damage to the twin barns. "I had a few tears."

The barns are beyond repair, Ray said. Even before the strong winds hit, water had rotted away supports in the granary, causing part of the north barn to collapse, he said.

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