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Jill Brady/Staff Photographer
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Jill Brady/Staff PhotographerSCARBOROUGH — A saw screeched from inside the white dairy barn. Then came the thud-thud-thud of a sledgehammer pounding wooden beams into their slots.
Michael Alderson and his fellow timber framers were working faster than ever to fix up the barn. They had to.
The wedding was almost here.
The first wedding ever at Broadturn Farm, in fact. Since picking the organic farm near the Buxton line as their wedding site, Heather Stewart and Ben Harvey of Asheville, N.C., had their heart set on making the 1800's-era barn part of their nuptials on Saturday.
"We want to have square-dancing," said Stewart, a 31-year-old librarian. "If it rains, we'll eat in there, too."
The barn, though, was filled with "ankle-breaking holes in the floor," when the couple visited in December, amid five inches of snow.
It's the same story for hundreds of barns around Maine, where neglect and the high cost of rehabilitation have left the buildings creaky and rotting. Every winter, barns collapse from the weight of the snow cover, their crooked silhouettes blotted out from the landscape for good.
But barns like the one at Broadturn Farm are being saved by being refashioned into something else entirely. Some are being used as storage space for sailboats and motorcycles. Others are being turned into art galleries, home offices and apartments.
Christi Mitchell, an architectural historian with the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, said it doesn't matter what the barns are being used for, as long as they survive.
"If you're having a wedding in there, you may not have your chutes and chicken roosts, but it's still standing and something that people will appreciate," Mitchell said.
The dairy barn at Broadturn Farm, besides being envisioned as an event space, would also be a place to house the farm's camp for children on rainy days. And it will retain some of its original agricultural use as a place to store bales of hay for the farm's eight sheep and three cows.
The Scarborough Land Conservation Trust, which owns the 434-acre Broadturn Farm and leases it out to tenant farmers John Bliss and Stacy Brenner, saw the barn less as a money pit and more of an investment. Holding an event there costs $1,500, according to the farm's Web site.
"We know it's essential to the success of the farm," said Marla Zando, of the land trust.
The trust raised $25,000 for the timber framers to replace the sills and the floorboards, using traditional techniques that join wood together with pegs and wedges rather than nails and other fasteners.
But as Bliss and volunteers pulled up old boards, they found that more of the wood had rotted than thought. They kept pulling and pulling. By the time they were done, the cost of renovating the barn was closer to $43,000.
Alderson, and fellow timber framers Jon Courtney and Robbie Alden decided to absorb the extra costs, and put in 50-hour weeks starting May 26 to renovate the barn in time for the wedding.
This week, the framers had upped their hours, working from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day.
"People on the farm are placing bets on us," said Alderson, gazing at the gaping holes in the floor of the barn Wednesday afternoon that still needed to be covered with hemlock planks.
Stewart and Harvey also surveyed the work ahead of the timber framers on Wednesday, as community members picked organic strawberries in the nearby fields and interns weeded the flower beds.
They had known the barn might not be ready for their wedding. But they still picked Broadturn Farm because it was part of a "real working farm" -- not one of those barns that had been appropriated by the "wedding industrial complex," said Harvey, a student of Chinese medicine who is originally from Portland.
But the couple stayed hopeful that the barn would be ready so their 95 guests could kick up their heels like farming families used to after...
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