The Glidden Barn of Illinois, which was added to the National Register of Historic Sites in 2002, is in no danger.

There may have been as many as ten million barns in the United States during the 1920s. But the decline of the family farm, a population shift to urban life and numerous other factors have reduced that number by about eighty percent. The National Barn Alliance is trying to preserve and restore the barns that still exist before we lose all of our “prairie cathedrals.” Like a lot of people who live in urban environs, barns seem to me an almost mythical part of the American landscape. An excerpt from a 2007 USA Today article on the topic:

“The barns–particularly in grain-farming states like Illinois and Indiana–serve little practical purpose. Barns were built primarily for livestock, but commercial livestock farming is a small business in much of the Midwest. Grain farming is more profitable than all but the biggest cattle or hog farms, but old barns aren’t big enough to store modern combines, planters and other farm machinery.

‘Someday, we wake up and the barns are all gone, it’s gonna’ be tough to educate our future generations,’ said Wallace Yoder, president of the Bloomington, Ill.-based BarnKeepers.

Most interest in saving barns, Rod Scott of the National Barn Alliance said, comes from urban dwellers and others like himself with no direct connection to farming. Modern agriculture emphasizes progress, while historic preservation is an expensive luxury that most farms can’t afford.

‘We’re literally at the end, in a generation, maybe two, of this great family farming era, which was pretty much from the 1600s to now,’ Scott said.”