Webster helps bring new life to historic barn

The locals thought owner Kyle Brown was nuts for wanting to keep a 150-yearold barn upright and builder Eric Webster wondered if he was nuts for trying to save it.

But Webster, owner of Webster Reclaimed Wood Products, got it done, extending the life of what he and Brown see as an important piece of history in Kearney, Neb.

The exact date of the barn’s construction is unknown, but the best guess Brown and Webster can give is likely the 1850s to 1860s. Brown does know there were 10 owners of the property before 1886, but no dates are on the historical documentation. In 1886, the Kahle family took it over and passed it down within the family until Brown bought it from a nephew of Delbert and Arlene Kahle in 2018 and promised to do what he could to save the barn.

“I called on construction guys, general contractors, I even called house movers that have moved barns 50-60 miles,” Brown said. “They all said the same thing, it’s just too far gone, you can’t do it. But we’ll build you a new one. Well I don’t want a new one. That’s what I’ve seen. Anybody that knew anything about barns is retired, they’re gone. There’s just nobody.”

Nobody except Webster, who has built his Stetsonville-based business on restoring barns.

“He’d been trying to get me to come down there for about two years,” Webster said. “Everybody else that he had talked to over the course of the period of time said that it was too far gone and that it couldn’t be done.”

“I just kind of followed him and reached out to him,” Brown said. “I’m sure he probably thought I was nuts. He was down in Texas the first time I reached out to him and I was like, ‘on your way through Nebraska on your way to Wisconsin, why don’t you stop by and look at this?’” Webster couldn’t stop in Kearney then, but he got there in December for the first time to see the structure, which is about 2,500 square feet but also 40 feet tall.

“I went and looked at it,” Webster said. “We talked different options but I wasn’t the most confident that it was going to be standing by the end of the day.”

Before the decision was even made to try to stabilize the barn, which Webster and Brown said had reached a point to where it had a 6-foot lean and a 4.5-foot twist, Brown spent two days on that December visit giving Webster a history lesson on the barn and the area, which sold Webster on trying to salvage it.

Brown said he’s been farming the 160acre plot the barn and a homestead sit on since 2015. It’s in the middle of an area that is highly-visited by hunters in the fall and by people who like to witness the sandhill crane migration in the spring. The property sits along the Platte River.

“The Platte River was kind of like the road map or the highway through the country back in the 1800s,” Brown said.

That’s what makes the land the barn sits on special to a history buff like Brown. It’s right outside of Fort Kearny, which is now a state historical park. The original Fort Kearny was established in 1848 by the U.S. Army as the first fort built to protect travelers on the Oregon Trail.

According to the Nebraska Historical Marker at the site, “Fort Kearny served as way station, sentinel post, supply depot and message center for 49ers bound for California and homeseekers traveling to Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. By the 1860s the fort had become a significant state and freighting station and home station of the Pony Express. ... One of the fort’s final duties was the protection of workers building the Union Pacific. In 1871, two years after completion of the transcontinental railroad, the fort was discontinued as a military post.”

“The westward gate is probably no more than a quarter-mile off my property,” Brown said. “It’s straight east of my property. So when the wagons left that gate, they went straight west, which would’ve made them come right across one of my hay meadows. They would go a mile west from that gate and they would turn and go north and they would cross the Platte River at a northwesterly angle because it was the shallowest.”

Depending on when the barn was actually built, there’s no telling how many of those settlers in the westward expansion of America passed right by it.

“Being right on the Oregon Trail and viewing the history of the town, there are a lot of museums and stuff there. It was pretty wicked,” Webster said of his history lesson that December weekend, which included a private tour of Fort Kearny.

As the weekend ended, it became time to make a decision. Webster’s first thought was like everyone else’s.

“He wanted some time with the barn and I just let him do his thing,” Brown said. “We had dinner that night, we sat down at the table and talked and (Webster) was like, you know this is pretty gone. He said, well I’ve come up with a couple of ideas. He wanted to read my barn that day, so I let him read the barn. What he came up with, he came back to the table and he says, you know you really should just tear it down and put a new barn up. I’ve got a new frame up in Wisconsin. I can ship that thing down.”

Brown said he liked the idea of tearing the barn down, bringing in the new frame and putting the old barn’s wood on it. But he just couldn’t do it.

“I said the only problem I have with it is that you’re going to bring a Wisconsin barn down, tear down my icon barn and put up a Wisconsin barn in Nebraska,” Brown said. “I said these guys that are die hard Huskers around here are going to crucify me at the stake. (Webster) said, well, ‘I can tell you right now that the probability in the morning of it being on the ground is higher than the probability of it standing.’ I said, ‘well that’s the college try I want to give it. If it comes down, it comes down.’” “We came up with a plan,” Webster said. “I decided it was best, when I began moving the building, that I had to keep going until it got to a point where I felt it could hold on its own. Within hours, (Brown) had rented a big light tower and set that up. I needed to drill anchor points because I ran a series of cables to pull the structure. Another guy came with his skidsteer within moments notice and he drilled the holes. We threw in the telephone poles in the holes all around the building. Another guy in the community offered a huge roll of high-tensile cable that he bought at an auction. It was cool. Everybody doubted him. They thought he was nuts. But I had more confidence that I could do it than I let on.”

Over 30 hours, much of it in a driving rain with wind, thunder and lightning, Webster worked the cables around the beams inside the building and the posts the crew placed on the outside to straighten the 6-foot lean. Brown said it hadn’t rained in Kearney in weeks, but Webster wonders if that moisture wasn’t a blessing, giving the old lumber some flexibility as the barn straightened.

“Because the building was leaning, sagging and had so much going on, in order for it to come back together, all the notches, holes and how everything was cut had to line up as it was coming back,” Webster said. “As I was doing that, I had to go into the barn and all of the upright center posts that held up the carrier beams were completely fallen off the concrete pads that they sat on. So I had to go in the building and start jacking it up before I could pull it even more.

“It was one of the biggest adrenaline rushes, it was creepy,” he added. “I’ve never heard a building make so much noise. When I arrived to look at the barn, Kyle wouldn’t even walk into it or walk inside of it. I got it to a point where I felt it could hold. It was about 30 hours. Then I wanted the building to settle.”

In early February, Webster returned, focusing on the upper part of the barn and eliminating the twist.

“I went up into the haymow and I connected cables from side to side, about a half of dozen of them to pull the top part of the barn together,” Webster explained. “The whole roof system was just popping and creaking. The posts that go from the ridge of the roof down to the mow floor, half of them were fallen through the hay loft floor so they weren’t supporting any weight. There’s actually a video I have on my Facebook page where you can hear how dramatic it was.

“To fine-tune it even more, I would go into the structure at night time when it got dark and I set up a floor plane laser level system to follow the studs and rafters. There are four sections of a roof and I had to line all of them up. Initially when I did that, it was getting pretty straight. The roof line was finally straight. It had a big dip in the center. That showed me that the peak of the building had to be pulled 2 feet to the south. It was pretty crazy. I can’t believe that I pulled it off.