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Pete French Round Barn Restoration

Lowest qualified bidder: Pilgrims Progress Preservation Services
Bid: $261,365
Scope of work: Replace roof, repairs structural roof frame and sheathing, repair masonry wall, site work
Schedule: Construction starts next month and will wrap up by year’s end

Bringing in a contractor can help fix shoddy work in an old building. In the case of an Eastern Oregon historic site, however, state parks officials want to keep the construction exactly as shoddy as the day it was built.

That’s the difference between typical repairs and renovation work, said John Platz with Pilgrims Progress Preservation Services, the lowest qualified bidder on the project near Burns. “If you do restoration, you’re just taking the building and returning it to the period of significance, which in this case is when the barn was built.”

Pete French, the cattle baron who ran a 100,000-acre ranch in the area, designed and built the round barn, 100 feet in diameter, around 1880. Ranch hands trained horses to pull wagons and move equipment.

The building is unique but familiar, Platz said. Working with the U.S. Forest Service, Platz helped found a field school for historical preservationists. Their first project, in 1995, was the round barn.

“Everybody knew the principles of historic preservation, but nobody was practicing it,” Platz said. “We thought it would be great if we could take that and sponsor a yearly school where people can learn the application of the principles they’re learning about.”

Those principles include using the same materials and construction methods as the original builders. The methods require careful research and training.

The materials, however, are often impossible to re-create. “The major problem is, as we exhaust our resources, the old-growth material is disappearing at a rapid rate,” Platz said.

Like other barns French built, the round barn uses juniper poles. The size of the poles, around 36 inches in diameter, means they were probably 500 to 600 years old, he said.

The barn’s former owner, the Jenkins family, has preserved junipers from the same stand French used for the barn. “You can take these juniper poles in the barn and determine which stump this was cut from,” Platz said.

“It gives you the shivers.”

Work on the project involves replacing more than 55,000 wood shingles covering the circular roof as well as repairs to an interior stone corral wall 60 feet in diameter.

The wall was mortared with local mud and didn’t cement well, said Dennis Bradley, park manager for the Clyde Holliday management district, which includes the round barn. An earlier flood damaged the wall and other parts of the barn, he said.

“In the early 1980s, there was about 3 feet of water in the barn, and it was in there a good year and a half,” Bradley said. While the area normally gets little precipitation, there’s no place for water to go when it does.

“There’s no drainage,” he said. “It’s basically a lake. When we have big snow events like we had in the early ’80s, the water (keeps) accumulating and accumulating.”

While that danger still exists, the project won’t make the barn more waterproof. Pilgrims Progress will use the same mud that French used 130 years ago, and use the same techniques his workers used.

The same goes for the roof construction methods. The barn provides a history lesson: Workers started carefully and then started to rush and get careless as they worked their way around the circular building.

“If you go up to the top and see the shimming between the roof and the interior wall, it was done perfectly,” Platz said. “But by the time you get back to where they started, they ran out of time, and they were putting bark and sawdust in there.

“The refinement went by the wayside.”

Platz’s team will carefully re-create that lack of refinement. “If there’s a gap, you leave a gap. If it’s poor workmanship, you make it look like poor workmanship.”

Overall, the workmanship has been sturdy enough to last this long. Bradley said he’s counting on the same longevity from work performed by Pilgrims Progress.

“With what they’ve done, this thing could stand another hundred years,” he said.