Anne’s Barn
Custom Barn Wood Woodworking
Welcome! I’m Robin, I’ve been a Montana rancher for over 50 years! These days one of my hobbies is building custom home décor pieces from my special pile of barn wood. Like my dad, I’ve always enjoyed carpentry. Mirrors, trays, coat racks, coffee tables, end tables and benches are just a few of things I’ve made. I often use old leather, rusty barbed wire, old horse bridles, and other stuff I find on the ranch as special touches on my creations. Below are some pictures of some recent things I have available. You are welcome to contact me and I can take custom requests and ship them to you. My barn wood supply is limited and very special to our family. …the story is below.
Email me at rcbauer7@yahoo.com if you are interested in anything! (pics below, we can discuss price and shipping)
The Story of Anne’s Barn
Jim Foley purchased the East Fork ranch from the original homesteader in 1905. He was married and had two young sons. Just four years after he bought the ranch his wife died leaving him and his sons, then 8 and 9, to work the ranch. They had to do all the fencing, irrigating, putting up hay and taking care of their cows and sheep. It was a lot of work and the boys were young so Jim hired a young girl to cook for them in the summer. The girl he hired was Anne, she was 15 years old. She loved the ranch and the family loved her, she was the cook and helped in the fields as well. She ended up staying on the ranch for 62 years!!
The Foley boys grew up and left the ranch to pursue their own dreams, Anne stayed and helped Jim and after 20 years she was his common law wife. Anne told me that they had a terrible time trying to keep the bears from getting their sheep, there were no wolves in their country then. So, sometime in the late 1920’s she and Jim went to the local saw mill and hauled wagon load after wagon load of slab wood and built a barn. The barn was 200 feet long and 40 feet wide. They used it for lambing and shearing the sheep and for protection for the sheep when the bears just wouldn’t leave them alone. This barn was so big and long, we all always referred to it as a land mark, calling it Anne’s Barn.
Anne said it finally became just too hard to keep the bears away so they sold the sheep and just ran cows and used the barn for calving in the winter.
Jim Foley died in 1948. In his will he left his ranch equally to his two sons and Anne. Anne asked the boys if they would sell their interest in the ranch to her and she would pay them off over time, as she could. They loved Anne dearly and they agreed. Now Anne was on the ranch by herself. She hired a man named Hank to come and help her on the ranch and the two of them did all the work themselves. Hank ended up staying for the next 23 years.
Anne sold the ranch to us in 1971. She was 76. She was a small slight woman, about 5’5”, around 110 lbs. and very fair skin, light blue eyes and white hair. She said then, that when she was out irrigating and haying in the summer, even though she wore a hat she could feel the sun on her head and it gave her terrible headaches and she just couldn’t handle it anymore.
When we bought the ranch the barn roof was starting to cave in, as it was all made out of wood. When the whole roof finally caved in, we took off all the wood slabs from the sides that we could salvage and stored them in the loft of an old log barn on our ranch. And that is where the wood stayed for the last 50 years!
The wood, having been sawn at the local saw mill, was and is very rough. Slabs were different thicknesses and different widths. Even the color of the wood is quite different, depending on what side of the barn the wood was on. Every piece, mirror, box, table made from the wood from Anne’s barn is different and unique because of the wood. No two pieces are the same.
I was one of the ones taking the wood slabs off the barn and storing it out of the weather. Now I am a little older than Anne was when she sold the ranch. Never thought I would be pulling those old boards out of the barn and making frames and boxes and tables out of them!! But the wood is gorgeous and it’s so much fun to see it come alive!
Gallery
Below are a few things I’ve made from Anne’s barn wood, click to see the full size picture.
