Construction Dates of House, Barn Revealed During July Program
By Susan Logan
During the Society’s July 12th program “Ohio Barns: Icons of Our Agrarian Past”, Dan Troth, speaker, announced the build dates of the Meeker House and Oberlander Barn. The dates were determined by sampling the wood from the beams in the two buildings, the house and barn.
These samples were submitted to the Wooster Tree Ring Lab at the College of Wooster, where they were compared with tree ring chronologies previously created from samples of both living trees and old wood. The tree rings extracted from old wood can be calendar dated and thus the staff at the Lab could determine the calendar dates when the trees that were used in the construction of the buildings at the Meeker Homestead were cut.
The trees used in building the Meeker House were felled in the winter of 1822, and the house was built ca. 1823, when Forrest Meeker was the owner of the property.
The beams in the Oberlander Barn were from trees cut in the winter of 1847 and used in the construction of the barn ca. 1848. George Bieber, who purchased the property from Forrest Meeker in 1845, emigrated from Pennsylvania to Ohio, which would explain the use of the Pennsylvania German barn structure.
Dan Troth, Vice President of Friends of Ohio Barns and a member of the Timber Framers Guild, included numerous photographs of historic barns in his presentation.