Canal-era barn and wall brought back to life

By TOM KANE

BARRYVILLE, NY — An historic barn and retaining wall that go back to the original Delaware-Hudson Canal era are being saved from extinction by a crew from a specialized dry stone company from Lexington, KY.

The old Corwin barn at the National Park Service (NPS) Ranger Station below Barryville on Route 97, which sits next to an overgrown canal basin, is the site of the renovation project, headed by a mason from Scotland.

Neil Rippingale from Edinburgh has been a stonemason for most of his adult life and has traveled with his trade to such places as Switzerland, Montreal, Australia, Nova Scotia and 24 states in the U.S.

“The Dry Stone Conservancy began work on October 16 and will complete the work on the barn wall and retaining wall by November 3,” said David Forney, Superintendent of the NPS Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River.

The company has a contract with the National Park Service to do work in all its locations throughout the nation. The company, which also trains workmen to be dry stonemasons, is the only company in the country devoted exclusively to dry stone masonry.

The conservancy was incorporated in 1996 as a non-profit company to preserve historic dry stone structures, to advance the dry stone masonry craft and to create a center for training and expertise nationwide.

“One of the problems we usually meet on an old project like this is that the old stone begins to laminate or separate and fall apart,” Rippingale said. “Here we’ve had to supplement the old stone with new in order to strengthen the structure. We’ve used local stone from the area so that the pattern and quality are consistent.”

“One of the problem faced at the Corwin barn is the way the building and wall were originally built,” said Sandra Schultz, Assistant Superintendent of NPS. “Their methods were inferior by today’s standards.”

The barn sits on the old towpath of the canal directly opposite from the canal basin.

At the site, Rippingale is not only directing the reconstruction but is also training eight workmen in the fine art of dry stone masonry. Three of the eight are National Park Service personnel from three of the NPS’s sites. One is from the Weir Farm in Ridgefield, CT; the second is from the Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park, NY and the third is a local NPS staff person.

“There are four levels of skills in the trade,” Rippingale said. “There’s the basic entry level, the apprenticeship level, the journeyman level and the master craftsman level. It takes five years to be fully trained.

“We like to go to an area and leave the skills there by training local people,” he said.

Besides the barn foundation, a crumbling retaining wall is also being saved.

Historic fences and buildings are often ruined by development, road-widening and neglect, and are hauled away, buried or ground into road rock, Rippengale said.

“We’ll finish on time by this Friday and will keep to the budget,” he said.

Their next project will be working on the foundations of the Roebling Bridge at Minisink Ford, which was weakened by the recent floods. “That won’t be for another year,” he said.