Tantramar Marsh hay barns slowly disappearing from landscape

The iconic landscape of the Tantramar Marshes outside Sackville, New Brunswick has been changing over the past few years.

Landmarks familiar to travellers on the road between New Brunswick to Nova Scotia are disappearing.

Gone are the Radio-Canada International Towers, a beacon for many as they travelled the Trans Canada Highway. Now, another feature is slowly disappearing from the landscape.

There are only 13 hay barns left on the Tantramar Marshes, down from as many as 400 that once stood. Colin MacKinnon, an avocational archeologist and historian says he has resigned himself to the fact that the barns will not survive.

"When you think of any heritage property, barns, houses, old buildings that you see, it's a struggle for any community to decide what gets protected and what doesn't," said MacKinnon. "Sometimes I look at this as merely aboveground archaeology, if you can save the story and save examples."

"To save dozens of these barns just isn't practical, but if you know the story behind it and a lot of people have written about the history of the marsh and its uses, you've got those stories."   

When MacKinnon wrote a story about the barns in 2000, there were 28. Nine years later, that number was down to 20. Now only 13 remain.

MacKinnon, a retired wildlife biologist, volunteers with the Tantramar Heritage Trust in Sackville. He has been helping to record the history of the hay barns.

May have been 400 barns on the marsh

"I think when we did our little map exercise there were something like 360, 370. I remember the late Reg Acton of Cookville, he used to be one of the marsh managers and he said even by 1950 a lot of the barns were gone so some suggest there were well over 400 at one time. It's just one of those things where we really don't know," said MacKinnon.

The heritage trust group is also working to save one of the barns that was designed after the standard English hay barn.

"They're so standard that they're even called 30 by 40s. They were 30 feet by 40 feet dimensions and the ones on the Tantramar are fairly close to that, but no two are the same," said MacKinnon.

MacKinnon described a standard hay barn as having three bays, with doors on opposite sides of the barn. When farmers brought hay in by horse and wagon, the horse would come through one door so workers could unload the loose hay. Then the horse would leave through the other door so it wouldn't have to back the cart out. 

The barns were built on the Tantramar Marsh because of the abundance of hay. Farmers and companies built the barns to hold the hay they harvested from the 26 square miles of drained and dyked marsh. MacKinnon says a 30 by 40 foot barn could hold up to 20 tonnes of hay.

"In Sackville for example, the Eastern Hay and Feed Company, which eventually sprung into Atlantic Wholesalers, they started here and a lot of it was shipping hay so they were really warehouses on the marsh," said MacKinnon.

"If you look at the maps some areas have very few barns and some areas had a lot of barns," he said. "Obviously the higher quality land had a higher capacity for hay and you needed more barns so you'll see that dispersion throughout the area."

"It tells you pretty much what that land capacity was for hay."

Family tradition

The ritual of unloading loose hay on the Tantramar Marshes is a familiar one to Doug Trenholm.

His family has farmed in the area for more than 200 years.

"My father, my grandfather and great-grandfather did that. They stored loose hay in it, we had a lot of hot summer days in there stowing hay and then in the winter time we would unload the barn and take it down to Aulac and load it on rail cars and ship it. We thought it was a lot of work but it was actually a lot of fun at that time," said Trenholm.

He adds the Tantramar Marshes were once considered the bread basket of the Maritimes for the quality and abundance of the hay.

Trenholm says he can remember a steady stream of loaded hay wagons going up and down the marsh roads, with farmers taking loads back home or to ship out.

The hay on the marshes is still abundant but farmers now bale it into round bales, wrap it and leave it outside until it is needed.

"You see the hay wrapped in the yellow, white plastic, different coloured bales. The technology changed," said MacKinnon.

One barn left in family

Trenholm's family had three barns on the marsh but only one remains. One was lost to the weather, and another to a fire. Mackinnon says that barn was one of the oldest in the area and to lose it in a fire was tragic.

But he adds Mother Nature can be just as merciless on the old barns and a single storm could take one down.

"It must be fairly violent when they let go because sometime you'll see them and they just look like a stack of cards that's fallen over," said MacKinnon.

MacKinnon says sometimes farmers clean up fallen barns and sometimes they just leave the wrecks. That's usually when scavengers, locally referred to as barn gnomes, will scavenge the weathered barn boards.

Some scavengers don't wait until the barn has collapsed before helping themselves, says Treholm. 

"Some of the fellows were borrowing them off the side of the barn over on the marsh there one time, so I had to take some florescent paint and spray the boards in a couple of places to keep them from stealing them off of the barn. It kind of stopped 'em from taking them."

Meanwhile, Thaddeus Holownia, a local photographer, has been documenting the barns through pictures.

"I've lived on the Tantramar for 30 some years and you become complacent about the locale," he said. "For me, passing the barns and having them as an integral element of my photography over the past 40 years, you take them for granted and when the barn burnt a kilometre down the road from my studio this past fall, it was kind of a reminder that, you drive by something a thousand times and it's invisible and then when it's not there, it's very visible," said Holownia.

"Figuratively or symbolically the vernacular barn is a really important part of that landscape. I think it's something that needs to be noted and cherished a little bit more."

Trenholm has resigned himself to the fact his family farm will probably end with him.

"I'd like to see it carried on but I can't see it going on any further. I think we've come to the end of the line. There are a lot more easier jobs than farming nowadays and more money, an easier way of making a living," he said.

Trenholm and his wife, Jackie are doing what they can to maintain the last barn they own on the marsh. They are happy the Tantramar Heritage Trust is working to save another barn as well.

Saving history

The group bought and relocated the barn four years ago to the High Marsh Road and have been fixing it up with plans to have it open for tours. MacKinnon says the effort to save and restore it has been worth it.

"It's nice to think that because they are so familiar that you can actually walk into one and get the idea of what most of them would have looked like," said MacKinnon.

Holownia recognizes what it means as an artist to lose some of his favourite subjects one by one.

"Things change, economies change, the barns saw their importance," he said. "Just the numbers that were there tell us how important they were to this region, and when they were no longer important to the economy of this region they began to disappear and they become historical artifacts. History is time and time changes things."