It stood strong for more than a century, but a Saskatchewan landmark is set to finally come down after suffering the wrath of this week’s winter storm.
The Sanborn round barn in Drinkwater, Sask., partially collapsed during the severe weather event Wednesday. Its owners say that while it will be tough to let it go, the barn now popular with tourists, photographers, nostalgia-lovers and more will have to be taken down.
“We think it went down at around three in the morning. I think a plow wind just hit it in the right direction,” said Allison Sanborn, a fifth-generation member of the family farm.
“I was sobbing all morning. It’s a hard one to say goodbye to. But it’s a safety hazard now.”
The barn was built in 1907 by Charles Dixon Sanborn, who travelled from Iowa to make the Drinkwater area his home, according to his great-great-granddaughter.
It was originally designed to encourage the wind to travel around the structure, and housed cattle and horses for decades.
Allison Sanborn says that the design is less functional when used with modern-day farming equipment, but that it was still used to house livestock when she was young.
“We had a three-storey farmhouse, but we spent all day, every day out in that barn,” said Sanborn, whose farm now specializes in grains. “We played and hung out in the hayloft, fed all the animals, and played bale tag.”
While the structure itself will come down, Sanborn says the barn will live on.
She says it can be found in the archives of many photographers, and has even been brought to life in watercolour by late-Saskatchewan artists Chesley Andersen.
“Everybody knows the round barn in Drinkwater. The Sanborn farm is Drinkwater. It’s a huge tourist site. All summer, people would come in asking to take photos.”
Sanborn said her family will also reclaim as much wood as they can when they take the rest of the barn down to sell and to use in personal projects around the farm.
“It’ll gently get taken apart and sold off and repurposed,” Sanborn said. “I’ve had lots of text messages saying ‘oh, I’m so sorry’ and ‘it’ll be a hard loss.’ Unfortunately, we just can’t justify rebuilding it.”
Several large structures in Saskatchewan suffered similar fates this week.
One of the steel bins attached to a grain elevator in Pense was flattened, while the other was damaged.
Meanwhile, in Milestone, employees showed up to Tarpco Manufacturing Thursday morning to find a garage door had collapsed and an entire wall was missing.