THE BARNS PROJECT
It’s an unlikely mishmash of individuals driving down the gravel roads of Leeds County in my Dodge van. Tina’s here from New York, a left-brain/right-brain bridge engineer/theatre director, and John, who repairs musical instruments in Ottawa. Allen and Cliff are news photographers from Montreal and Peterborough, respectively, and then there’s me, a winery tour guide from Prince Edward County. Thus, the minivan.
Tina calls us a disparate group of barn seekers. We had a seat for Russ, too, a self-described hippie/writer, lifelong bookseller and community activist for the arts, but he couldn’t join us this time on another daylong trek to record the portraits and stories of pre-1900 barns.
Despite our differences, we are on a common mission. The magical magnetism that brings us together is the memory of our big, bearded late, great friend Gordon Beck, a 25-year veteran photojournalist at the Montreal Gazette. He and his camera were witness to many of Canada’s most historic moments as he came face to face with popes and prime ministers, the homeless and every other walk of life in the big city.
But there was no place he’d rather be than out in places like Plum Hollow and Devil’s Door Road, meeting farmers and hermits and hearing tales of a bygone era in a forgotten region of rural Ontario. “Cathedrals of the Fields” is what he called the old barns. He held a reverence for each one, and he studied them with a portrait artist’s eye before snapping an eternal image (usually only one) with his camera.
Even while working at the
