CHARLOTTESVILLE — A stately 60-by-36-foot red barn just south of Fort Wayne has been taken apart — piece by piece — and will soon be resurrected on a Charlottesville farm.
Dean Fout came across the listing to sell the century-old barn on Facebook.
He’d been looking for a way to add a large barn to his 20-acre farm, but found that building one from scratch was cost prohibitive. That’s when he started scanning ads for old barns, and he found one in Ossian in northern Wells County.
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He hired an Amish man named Earnest who used a 15-person crew to dismantle the barn, piece by piece.
“The barn will be used to calve out my Angus herd and store hay. I wanted to repurpose it to save a piece of Indiana history,” said Fout, who was born and raised in Hancock County.
The barn was built in Ossian around 1920, he said.
Over the past few weeks, Fout has had a basement dug out and walls poured on his Charlottesville farm to serve as a walk-out basement for the new barn.
It’s a project two years in the making, as he has scanned sale ads and Facebook posts seeking out the perfect structure.
The Amish, from northwest Ohio, will rebuild the barn in Hancock County. He has hired a transport company to move it here from Ossian.
He hired his son Evan’s remodeling company, Fout Concepts, to oversee this project.
Once the barn is set in place, Fout plans to then put on a new metal roof, and will likely power wash the original wood exterior and repaint it white to match his existing white barns with green roofs.
“I want it to look like a barn from the early 1900s, not a pole barn,” said Fout, who has grown his cattle operation while working full-time as security manager at Covance in Greenfield.
He had previously been looking to relocate an old barn on the east side of Greenfield, but the owner eventually changed her mind.
Then he started exploring the possibility of building a new barn.
When he heard about the barn in Ossian, about 90 minutes north, he wasted no time in tracking down sources for local Amish crews that could dismantle and rebuild it.
Earnest, the man he reached, just happened to be working near the Ossian barn and offered to go by and take a look at it that night.
“He said, ‘that’s a really nice barn, what are you wanting to do with this?’ I told him I wanted him to rebuild it at my house.”
Fout is thrilled to see the work set into motion. His son, Evan Fout, created a video of what the barn looked like before, and plans to do a time lapse film of the barn being reconstructed.
Fout said the project has already caused quite a buzz among neighbors who have asked him what his plans are for the giant hole he’s dug on his farm. He can’t wait to see what the barn looks like once it’s in place, especially when it’s repainted and re-roofed to blend in with his other barns.
“It’s a piece of history, so I want to restore it back to its original beauty,” said Fout, who plans to run his calving operation from the barn’s basement and store straw and hay overhead.
His family moved to the farm in 1994, when they built a new home on 20 acres. They now have 20 angus cows, and specialize in breeding and artificial insemination.
“We breed six or eight cows in a given day, and they all calve within a two- to three-day period. We don’t have the facilities to calve out three or four at a time, so we decided to build a barn to facilitate that,” he said.
The woman from whom he bought the barn said it had sentimental value and that it had been in her husband’s family for generations. She wanted to sell it to someone who planned to continue using it as a barn, not tear it down for reclaimed wood or turn it into a house or event venue.
“That’s why she chose me to let me have it,” said Fout, who is thrilled to help preserve a piece of Hoosier farming history.
He’s also thrilled with the price of buying, moving and rebuilding the barn and creating the basement — right around $100,000 — compared to the $180,000 it would have cost to build new.
“I just couldn’t justify that to my wife,” he said.
Most of the cost will be in pouring the basement, followed by transporting, painting and re-roofing the barn, said Fout, who paid $4,000 for the barn itself and $6,500 to have it dismantled.
“We hope to have it in place before Christmas,” he said.
