One of the the most prominent recurring symbols of the Great State of Texas is the noble steed. Horses have played a major role in the history and the settlement of the Republic of Texas, and later the State of Texas. They are still important today.

Horses yesterday and today

In the early days, horses were more than just transportation, they often meant survival! Horses were also the tools of the cowboy trade. Texas ranchers still use horses to round up cattle, even with all the other equipment available, a horse and rider can still accomplish some tasks that a 4 wheeler can't! Today's Lone Star cowboys still need a place to protect these great animals from the often dangerous weather conditions of our region.

Texas horse barns have changed

Like everything else, horse barns have changed, the materials from which they are built have changed, and the way they are constructed has changed. Horse barns today are often built for specific purposes like "run in" sheds, stables, and stalls for housing and grooming, and hay barns, and these are often built as separate buildings. Each type is important to the proper care and feeding of our equine friends.

Modern Texas horse barns

Today's horse barns are often built with steel beams, or wooden poles and clad with sheet steel. Some are modular, cut to size in a factory, and put together on site. Some are built using post frame construction methods, and some are even portable, built off site and hauled onto site. There are many choices, and often several types will exist on one ranch. There are scaled down versions available for smaller operations.

Area and cities served

Ben’s Barn’s of Alba Texas serves the area from Mineola to Greenville along highway 69, and Canton to Sulphur Springs along highway 19. This includes Mineola, Alba, Emory, Point, Lone Oak, Greenville, Sulphur Springs, Canton, and the surrounding areas.

Products and services

Ben’s Barns offers high quality barns, portable barns, garages, storage buildings and other structures with the best of materials, and superb craftsmanship. Portable barns and storage barns can be built on site, or delivered to your site, and Ben’s Barns also offers rent to own as a purchasing option.

Ben’s offers custom construction, from large barns to small storage sheds with the same great quality and attention to detail.

Ben’s Barns
5140 U S Hwy 69
Alba, TX 75410
(903) 213-5769

Counties Served
Ben’s Barns services Wood County, Rains County, Hopkins County, Van Zandt County and Hunt County in the East Texas area.

There was a time when Texas had a distinct barns style, and that style was quite similar to the small portable barn pictured on this page.

The layout was not for visual effect, each part had a specific purpose, in many cases it included a double loft. One side was often used for feeding cattle or horses, or in some cases, milking dairy cows, the other sometimes served as a poultry house or similar purposes.

When was a child, I was lucky enough to have lived on 2 properties where 2 of these old cathedrals to agriculture from earlier days were present. One was a log structure with rough hewn, flat logs, and the other was a timber frame structure of similar design, well built and solid.

One we used much as it had been used the century before, the other was left unused, and became my home away from home, and personal playground, and fueled a life long interest in construction techniques.

As children we would take our western style cap pistols and reenact the old western movies and TV shows that were so popular during that era in and around them. A practice that seems to be frowned upon in today's more sophisticated culture. The western movie has all but disappeared from the screen these days, and these old barns have seen their better days, and at least one has been torn down to make way for a more sleek modern, and more practical model.

As a preteen and teenager, barns began to have a slightly more practical symbolism. They were the places where we stacked the hay in the days before it was rolled and hauled by tractor and trailer. Thank heavens for mechanization, but it did take away the summer jobs of a lot of young men around the country used that few cents a bale they made by hauling and stacking for extra cash. Overall, it was an improvement for everyone. My most vivid memory of a barn during that period of my life was waking up in the hay loft with vomit all over me after having passed out from heat exhaustion. Not nearly as pleasant as the earlier childhood memories!

There were pleasant memories from my older teen years that involved hay barns, but none that I can tell you about on this site. Let's just say that a gentleman doesn't kiss and tell.

Barns play many important roles in the world of rural agriculture, and for that reason they are important to everyone. Everyone has to eat, and it is a good bet that a barn played at least a small part in the production of what you had for dinner!

I remember reading a story a few years back about some linguists working on definitions for some obscure colloquial phrases. It seems that they had spent quite a bit of time and energy attempting to find a definition for a particular phrase. The phrase in question was the term "fade barn".

At some point during their search they ran across an older New England farmer and asked him if he had ever heard of the term. The farmer said yes. His definition was a little surprising to the linguists: "A fade barn is a barn where you store the fade for your livestork."

Escaped cattle brought by the Spaniards into countries south of the U.S. border and escaped cattle brought into America by European settlers met in the area we now know as Texas. They created a unique breed of cattle, and their presence created a unique breed of men who made a living gathering these cows and driving them to market. The cowboy. It lasted for about a century in it’s initial form, and the vestiges of this culture live on today in the people known as Texans.

Gradually, over many years, settlers came to stay. They built ranches and farms, dug wells, built barns and houses, usually in that order, and the often difficult and dangerous place known as Texas was settled, as much as you can settle such a place. In truth, the land settled the people as much as the people settled the land.

Texas barns of the past

The settling of the land required a place to protect the settler’s, supplies, and domestic animals from often hostile outside forces. In such cases, barns were often the first structures to be built. “Build your barn, and let your barn build your house”, was a common proverb among settlers throughout the new world.

The early barns built in Texas were similar to the barns built everywhere else. They were assembled of the materials at hand which varied from sod to logs, and from stone to mud. Over time many developed characteristics unique to the new environment.

Texas developed into more than just a farm and ranch powerhouse, fuel oil and natural gas production drove the economy forward, lakes were built as reservoirs on an unprecedented scale to meet the water needs of our growing population, and fueling an enormous tourist fishing trade, and technology now produces jobs and growth in the same places where the longhorns once roamed.

Today’s Texas barns

Barns in Texas today still provide some of the same services as their predecessors. Farming and ranching in Texas still thrives, and new agricultural buildings are being built every day. Many of the older barns that once provided service as homes and for agriculture, have been preserved in their natural state. Many more have become homes. Today, barns are rarely the multifunctional buildings of the past, they are far more likely to be built as separate units for each function. Large buildings for storing hay or other agriculture produce, mid sized buildings for equipment, run in sheds for animals, and a variety of small barns serve other purposes around the home, the farm, and the ranch.

Barns have evolved. Much of our rural farmland has been subdivided. Many farms have become smaller, and with these changes, came the need for a new type of small barn commonly called a storage barn. Today, instead of having one large barn that serves many purposes, we may have several smaller buildings which each serve single purposes, like a small barn for animal feed, an equipment shop, and a small run in shed.

These storage barns are often portable buildings, and may change locations on the property to meet changing needs.

We choose the materials we use for building structures based on availability. Barns are usually no exception. Throughout history there have been stone barns, dried mud barns, sod barns, log barns, timber frame barns with plank siding, barns built from fired brick, and in modern times, barns built with various polymers and metals.

Steel barns

The most common barn siding metal today is steel, and for good reason. Steel is strong, it can be galvanized and paint to the point where rust is rarely a problem, and it requires little maintenance. Steel can be used as a siding on post frame structures, timber frame structures, and steel frame structures.

Wooden barns

Before you start to wonder if wood is no longer a viable barn building material, give a little thought to this: With advances in treated wood, wood sealers, and paint, wood can still hold it's own in modern barn building. Wooden barns may require a little more maintenance than their steel counterparts, but if you are trying to get that rustic look to blend with the scenery, wood may be the perfect barn building material for your project.

Pole barns, or post frame structures have been in existence for a big part of mans history. Probably starting with "lean to" type structures with branches thrust as deeply into the ground as possible, with cross branches spanning the top, and leaves, branches, and latter, thatch covering the top. This is one of the simplest types of structures, and has been commonly used throughout mans history. The most basic forms required little more than a few long poles inserted in holes in the ground, lashed together with posts spanning the perimeter at the top, and with other poles added to create a roof.

Pole barn uses

Pole barns have been used widely in agriculture, and formed the basis for buildings serving many purposes, such as hay barns, cattle stalls, horse barns, and simple equipment sheds with a flat roof sloped front to back to shed water. Today, post frame construction techniques are used for almost every type of building you can imagine.

Advances in pole barns

Today, post frame structures, while sharing the same basic construction technique with their ancient predecessors, have become much more advanced in both materials and techniques. Today, the posts are usually made of treated materials, and the ground contact end sheathed in rot resistant materials. Many of these modernized pole barns are more complex structures used as homes throughout the country. The siding used today is often double galvanized sheet steel, which is then primed and painted to provide years of maintenance free durability.

Most of the time when people think of horse barns, they are thinking of stables, or even loafing sheds or run in sheds. There are a few technical differences between the types of barns represented by each of these different phrases, but today, they are used synonymously in most cases.

Loafing sheds, or run in sheds, are the terms commonly used for the care of any type of farm or ranch animal. Horse barns may have features specific to the needs horses.

The purpose of the building will determine the what all is needed in the structure.

Just exactly what constitutes a barn? At one time there was a fairly clear distinction between barns and other outbuildings, but in today’s usage, a barn can be just about any outbuilding, from a simple storage shed, to a much more complex multi use facility.
In the past, a barn was an agricultural building used for housing animals, storing grain, feed, and hay, and for storing tac, and equipment. They were often used for work during in-climate weather. Today, we often use several buildings to perform the same functions.

We may use a garage or carport to house our transportation, we may have another outdoor storage building or storage shed to keep lawn and garden equipment safe, and we may have a separate workshop for working in bad weather. We may even have a separate building for storing animal feed, these days usually for dogs and cats.

Even in rural areas where an agricultural barn is still needed, many of the former functions are farmed out to other buildings.

Barn notes:

What is a mini barn?

A min barn is, substantially, just that, a mini, or miniature barn. It is pretty much just a storage shed used as a barn. There might be some difference, but essentially they are the same. If you want to use your mini barn, or storage shed for actual livestock, it would probably be best to have one built without a floor, or on a slab.

What is a pole barn?

Post frame structures, or pole barns as they are often called, are versatile structures, which can be simple sheds with flat roofs, or large complex buildings suited for living quarters. Holes are dug into the ground and posts inserted to allow for the building of a frame. Such structures are very strong because of the building method.

Barn structure types.

Timber frame

In much of Europe and early America barns were constructed in much the same way as other structures using the timber frame method. This involved setting a foundation, and raising a timber skeleton of the building and then covering the structure with planks. Spaces between the main supports were sometimes filled in with the equivalent of modern studs. The number of studs was usually determined by the importance of what the building housed.

Log barns

Log barns were another common type of barn building. It used many resources, but in the early days of our country, trees were an abundant resource in much of the new territory, and an obstacle to farming.

Post frame barns

Post frame structures, or pole barns as they are often called are a more modern type of barn. They have existed in one form or another for hundreds of years, but today the types of materials used, and the methods employed make them a popular and reliable form of barn structures.

Other barn types

There are many methods used for barn building, but most of them fall into one or the other of the above mentioned categories. Even steel framed structures set on a foundation, or on top of the ground are basically using the same methods as timber frame construction.

james@customutilitybuildings.com

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