After 68 years in one place, a Saskatoon area landmark has picked up stakes and moved on – to another farm, that is.
Built in 1939 at the end of the horse era, the Dreger barn was a fixture along Highway 5, just east of Saskatoon.
“Big draft horse barns weren’t being built. Draft horses were coming to an end. The barn only held livestock until 1964 or so,” said Gregg Adams, the new owner.
With its drive-in loft ramp and pony wall on one side, the job of moving the barn two kilometres was left to Dennis and Ryan Sawitsky of Wakaw, Sask.
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“It’s the biggest barn we’ve ever moved. With that pony wall it’s also the most complicated,” said Dennis Sawitsky, who moves four or five barns each year.
The hip roof barn is 10 metres wide, 23 metres long and 11 metres high and weighs an estimated 40,000 kilograms.
The barn is best known for its history as a 1950s dance hall and a hand painted sign on one end still reads “Barn Dance Sat. Nights.”
There hasn’t been a barn dance held there in 40 years, but the sign and the big barn on Highway 5 east of Saskatchewan’s largest city conjure up mental pictures for people too young to have experienced mid-summer night dances and the smell of livestock down below the loft.
So successful were the dances on the fir loft floor that the farmer-builder, Louie Dreger, invested in a local ballroom down the road and the barn fell into disuse.
Sawitsky said the barn is well built and withstood the unique lift and support system he and son Ryan needed to jack it off its old foundation.
“We had to support it on the west side with cribbing up the ceiling,” he said.
Adams said convincing the former owner, Walter Stevenson, that he and his wife Lori were serious about buying the barn, and moving it, took more than a year.
“Then I talked to him after harvest and we made a deal. First I had to get the junk out of it. We shovelled snowdrift-high bird droppings out of the loft dance hall,” he said.
“My wife and I did that together.
I think it must be a strong relationship.”
The couple built a new foundation for the barn on their acreage overlooking the city. Adams, a professor at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine, plans to move his llamas from his brother’s farm next door to populate the barn.
“And whatever other livestock ends up on a veterinarian’s farm will be in there,” he said.
The new barn will have a medical treatment area in addition to the usual barn amenities.
“I put a level on it and it’s perfect. It made the move just as planned.”
The couple describes it as their personal, giant recycling project.
“We’ve got a barn dance planned too. But not until we get it settled into its new home first,” said Adams.
