In 1987 the dairy operation closed. The cows went to auction. My grandfather sat on the porch of the farmhouse and cried. For twenty-seven years the barn just stood there — a beautiful, useless heirloom.
The first century
My great-grandfather Eli Calloway built this barn in 1894. He was thirty-one and had just inherited the parcel from his father, who had inherited it from his father, who had cleared the trees in 1851. Eli was a careful man. He sourced the chestnut beams from a stand of hardwood half a mile downhill and dragged them up with two mules. The original frame is mortise-and-tenon — there are no nails in the load-bearing structure.
For ninety-three years the barn held Holsteins and Jerseys. Forty head at the peak in the 1950s. The milk-cooling room, which is now the bridal suite, kept the morning's run at thirty-eight degrees until the cooperative truck came up the road at noon. My grandfather took over the operation in 1958 from his father, who had taken it over from Eli.
I remember walking the milk parlor as a five-year-old, holding my grandfather's hand. He named every cow. He could tell you which one was sick by the way she stood at the gate. The barn smelled like sawdust and warm hay and something sweet I haven't smelled since.
By the mid-1980s the regional dairy economy was collapsing. The cooperative consolidated. The price per hundredweight dropped below the cost of feed. My grandfather held on for two more years. In the spring of 1987 he sold the herd at auction.
The empty years
For twenty-seven years the barn just stood there. The roof held. The chestnut held. Vines grew up the western face. A barn owl moved in. We mended what we could and walked past it the rest of the time.
When my grandfather died in 2009 he left the land to me. I was twenty-two. I was finishing my master's in agricultural economics at NC State and had no idea what I was going to do with a hundred and four acres of mountain hollow and an empty barn.
Cole proposed to me in 2013 on the dance floor of my cousin Sarah's wedding. Sarah's wedding was in a restored barn in Tennessee. The reception was the warmest night of my life. We drove home the next morning at four in the morning, both of us quiet, and somewhere around Greeneville Cole said, very simply, "What if we did this. What if we did this here."
The restoration
We started in February 2014. The estimate was nine months. It took fourteen.
We stripped the rotted siding by hand. We sistered three joists where moisture had eaten into them. We sourced reclaimed Appalachian chestnut from a sister barn in Ashe County for the dance floor — the original floor was beautiful but uneven, and a wedding party in heels would not have forgiven us. The new floor came in at three thousand four hundred square feet. We laid it ourselves over six weekends with our cousin Drew, who is a carpenter.
The bridal suite was the milk-cooling room — concrete floor, eight-foot ceilings, one bay window facing the mountains. We poured a new floor over the concrete, dropped in heart-pine planking, framed an adjacent bathroom out of an old feed-storage closet, and put in a vanity mirror that came out of a 1920s Asheville hotel.
We hung a thousand string lights from the chestnut rafters. We pulled HVAC up from the basement and ran new plumbing to the suite and the groom's room (which used to be the tack room, with the original cedar saddle pegs still on the wall). We installed an industrial dishwasher in the kitchen. The bathrooms — there are six — are new.
The first couple toured it the week we got the certificate of occupancy. They booked it ninety minutes later. They got married here in May 2015. I still get a Christmas card from them every December.
Today
We host thirty-eight weddings a year. We could host eighty. We won't. The number we settled on is the number where we can walk every couple through the property ourselves on tour day. Where I can know your dog's name, your mother's wedding-day outfit, the song you and your father picked for the daddy-daughter dance, by the Friday before your Saturday. Where Cole can light the bonfire the way Cole likes to light the bonfire.
Our two daughters live in the 1908 farmhouse next door. June is six and Wren is four. They sometimes wave from the porch on tour days. Sully the black lab is twelve and earns his keep by sleeping on the front step. Cole is in the back ten acres most weekdays — there is always a fence to mend, a stand of trees to clear, a stretch of creek to clean up.
We're not a wedding company. We're two people, our daughters, a dog, and the barn my great-grandfather built. That's the whole operation. That's the whole point.
We restored this barn so it could keep being a place where people remember being part of something. Dairy farming did that for a hundred years. Weddings do it now.