|
Riding "round" the Rally Elsewhere on this web site, Mike LaBar showed you some of the many nice-looking barns near the Rally site in Lima, all freshly painted as part of Ohio’s recent bicentennial celebration. If you looked closely, you may have noticed they all had one other thing in common... they were square. So what, you say... aren’t all barns square? That’s what I thought, too until coming across a couple of interesting websites that listed the locations of a large number of round barns throughout the midwest... many located in Ohio, many near Lima, or on the way. |
Got a comment about this article?
Download a
GPS file with the locations
|
The websites, http://www.dalejtravis.com/ and http://www.ohiobarns.com/, contain photos and most important, GPS coordinates of all the round barns in the state. To me, this had all the makings for some interesting riding routes... ‘round the Rally.
This barn is located about a bit over an hour away from the
rally
site. You can download a GPS file and
take yourself a pleasant day-ride.
Photo by Mike MacCarter.
Why Round?
Round and polygonal barns
and farm buildings date back to 800 A.D. as a plan for the St. Gall
Monastery in Switzerland. George Washington built a 16-sided barn of brick
on his farm in Virginia in 1793. According to William Tischler, landscape
architecture professor at the University of Wisconsin, the orthogonal,
which includes the round and octagonal and hexagonal barn came in shortly
before the turn of the 20th century. There was some early experimenting
going on regarding the practicality and the functional qualities of a
round barn. Michael J. Auer wrote that “the circular form has a greater
volume-to-surface ratio than the rectangular or square form. For any given
size, therefore, a circular building will use fewer materials than other
shapes, thus saving on material costs. Such barns also offer greater
structural stability than rectangular barns. And because they can be built
with self-supporting roofs, their interiors can remain free of structural
supporting elements, thereby providing vast storage capabilities. The
circular interior layout was also seen as more efficient, since the farmer
could work in a continuous direction.” Sounds sort of like a
horizontally-opposed twin, no?
However, it was found that expanding a circular building was
very awkward, and the claims for the efficiency of the round barn were
overstated. Plus, building a round barn required a little more skill and
some greater difficulty because boards and lumber typically are square and
come in straight lengths. So they eventually fell out of favor.
The wheels on your beemer go round and
round....
How many round barns can you find? There are 18
round barns in the immediate Lima area (say... west of Columbus) and 47
throughout the entire state. Here are their GPS
locations. The file contains a Mapsource (.mps) file, a .gdb file (you
need the latest version of Mapsource for this one) and a Micosoft Streets
and Trips file. If you do happen to find a few on your way to Lima, please
bring your digital camera and post a few digitial pics to the BMW MOA Forum.
Round barns were thought to use space more
efficiently and their roofs
were self-supporting. The complexity of
construction and expansion
led to them falling out of favor.
Photo by Dale J. Travis
