Sunbeams filter through the barn’s weathered boards, spotlighting its cavernous interior.
Dan Bates / The Herald
An antique tractor dozes in one shadowy corner, a barn owl in another.
Scattered scraps of hay cover the floor below a rusting pitchfork, still leaning where the farmer last left it.
A century ago, the shoulders of barns, made of the tallest hand-cut forest timbers, were hauled from the woods on the shoulders of men.
Barns were raised with economy, but also with skill. Those who built them had the sturdy intention that the barn must stand for their work, but also for the work of their children and grandchildren.
Most of the old-growth forests that provided the barn beams are gone. Disappearing, too, are the farm families that tamed Snohomish County.
Only 37 dairy farms remain from the some 1,500 that were here 60 years ago.
A few families cling on.
A few barns do, too. Some stand empty – still fit for work. They’ve outlasted their jobs. Inside, their wooden stalls are shiny smooth from cow shoulders rubbing the rails, shuffling in and out for daily milkings.
The world has shifted more quickly than Snohomish County’s collection of creaky old giants.
The Kraetz Farm Arlington
The barn is going on 90, but it’s still red with white trim. And its roof still keeps rain off the hay. Loren Kraetz sees to that, as his father and grandfather did.
“Some people used to say if they had money, it was better to keep the barn in good shape than the house, because the house was just a place to live.”
His grandfather Anton moved here in 1902 and put the barn up in 1916. He knew then what Loren Kraetz knows now -a dairy farm without a well-built barn is like a cow without udders.
John, Loren’s father, was born in a farmhouse bedroom. His entire life, the farmer blazed a trail between the house, the barn and the fields. Then he died in the same bedroom.
Kraetz, 69, now lives on the farm with his wife, Pat, and his mother, Olive.
“I’m the end of the line. I don’t have any children. I don’t know what happens to it when we’re gone,” he said as a windmill turned behind him, pumping creek water up for the cows to drink.
When things were humming 30 or 40 years ago, the Kraetz farm covered 80 acres, 30 of them rented. They had 50 cows.
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“Many people raised a family on 24 cows. A big herd was 40 to 50 cows. Now, I would say a small herd might be 100 cows.”
He’s down to 13 cows. They’ll stay as long as he does.
“You need something to keep the grass chewed down. We’ll always have a few, at least, if nothing else than just for the sake of nostalgia.”
The family bought its first milking machine in 1943. Around that time, wood stoves were used to heat houses.
Wood stoves make poor baby sitters. Loren Kraetz and his baby sister couldn’t safely sleep in their beds while their parents worked. So they went to the barn at 4 a.m., too.
“I remember my sister being in the baby buggy in the barn. And then, what do you do with little kids? My grandpa made me a wooden hammer out of a piece of vine maple, and they used to give me hazelnuts, and I’d sit on the (barn) floor and crack nuts.
“I can remember sitting in front of the cows, in loose hay, and watching the cows chew their cuds. The big cows would naturally chew more than the smaller ones – the most I ever counted a cow chewing was 93 chews.”
He’d head out to the barn when he needed help with schoolwork. His father, crouched on a stool while milking a cow by hand, would help the boy memorize nursery rhymes or the Pledge of Allegiance.
After he graduated from cracking nuts, Loren Kraetz’s job was to feed calves from a bottle – milk diluted with hot water. Then he started milking at age 10.
“I remember how my arms just ached, it was so hard to get the milk to come out.”
He watched his parents milk by lantern light. During World War II, when the West Coast worried about a Japanese attack, there were required blackouts across the region.
The young Kraetz danced in swept-out haylofts, where neighbors stomped their feet to guitar or accordion music and shared coffee and sandwiches.
Even if none of his nieces or nephews step up to take over, there’s a good chance the land will remain a farm. Snohomish County officials tell him that’s the way they want it, and the flooding makes it so.
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“People want to come out and see barns and green farmland, but there’s no way in this day and age you can make a living at it. It’s pretty difficult, let’s put it that way.”
The Schakel Farm Stanwood
It’s midmorning, and Dennis and Kim Schakel are on their way to assist a birth. That is, to pull a stuck, turned-around calf out of its mother.
Six months ago, the young couple, who now wear matching grins and rubber boots, made the biggest decision of their lives. They traded comfortable city life for a future on a dairy farm.
They sold their Redmond condo, he quit his engineering job, and they borrowed $200,000 to buy 100 cows.
Now they live in a single-wide trailer with gold siding they fondly refer to as “The Golden Palace.” He found it for free in the classified ads.
“We just had it moved here. We roped off part of the cow field behind my parents house to be a yard,” said Dennis Schakel, 29.
The youngest of four children, Dennis Schakel was raised on the farm. None of his older siblings have returned to farm life. Dennis Schakel left for a while to become an engineer at Genie Industries. Even then, he’d spend his weekends “playing” in his family’s farm.
His father, Bill, bought the dairy farm more than 40 years ago when he came here from the Netherlands. When Bill Schakel retires, Dennis would like to take over the whole operation.
At more than 100 years old, it looks like the family’s barn will now be used for at least one more generation of farm work.
“Our barn is an essential part of the whole farm operation,” Dennis Schakel said. “Everything we have kind of revolves around it. The barn is the center of all our building.”
Kim Schakel, 30, is trained as a medical assistant. For now, the former city girl makes her living in the very first barn she ever stepped foot in.
She works side-by-side with her husband, and both chuckle when they have to buy milk at the store. Theoretically, there are hundreds of gallons sitting in a tank out back.
Every time she drinks a glass of Darigold milk, Kim Schakel wonders if it came from their cows. After all, they send out 7,000 pounds of milk every other day.
They know life on a dairy farm is harder than life in the city. There are early, nose-bitingly cold mornings. There is a bottomless list of chores. And unlike their place in downtown Redmond, the scent of manure and sounds of the tractor wander in when they open their windows.
“I have no doubt in my mind that I made the right choice. I’m enjoying what I’m doing. I work a lot more, I make a lot less and I’m having a lot more fun,” Dennis Schakel said. Still, “it’s a hard sell if you weren’t raised in this, and a lot of times if you were.”
Barns embody the county’s struggle to preserve its past while also keeping up with a faster, sleeker, more crowded future.
Barns follow farms, with more of both vanishing from the landscape every year.
Some barns collapse, all broken down. Bulldozers shove others away to make room for new homes and businesses.Barns become folk-craft boutiques. Vegetable stands. Dusty storage units. They get overrun by blackberry tangles and time.
As far as anyone knows, there has been no official local or statewide survey of barns. Snohomish County officials figure that in the 1930s there were about 2,000 barns here.
Unlike other areas of the nation with endangered barn populations, Snohomish County hasn’t seen a concentrated movement to save those that remain.
County farmers are talking now about how to make farming last another 100 years. Long before a century passes, most barns that helped the county build its heritage may be gone altogether, featured only in photos and fading memories.
It’s a future that doesn’t favor old family farms, and one that favors less expensive, more practical corrugated metal sheds.
The Hereth Farm Snohomish
Karl Hereth, 26, took a good look at his family’s old barn.
The whole thing is settling – melting into the earth – and it stumbled from its foundation years before he was even born. Rain and sun beat its red walls to brown.
Most of the roof was still there, staying strong after its legs had given out.
“I was just thinking of things we could do with the old wood. I collected a couple of old boards that had fallen off the siding, planed them down and built a box out of it – a jewelry box for my wife shortly before we were engaged. For Christmas.”
His father, Mark Hereth, used some of the wood to make a present for his daughter – bookshelves. Once the age was sanded off, the fir boards turned a lovely blond color.
The bookshelves and the jewelry box may be passed on even if the barn can’t be salvaged.
Mark Hereth’s great-grandfather built the barn around 1905.
“We used it until 1966, when it last had cows milked in it. It had fallen into disuse. … It was time for it to be torn down. We haven’t yet, but we need to. It’s falling down,” he said.
“From a distance, it doesn’t look too bad, but you get inside and it’s really not in good shape at all,” Mark Hereth said.
The owls can have it.
Back in the day, Mark Hereth checked into putting the barn back on its foundation. It was valuable historically, but righting it would have cost more than tearing it down and building a new barn.
“I personally know that if the barn hadn’t fallen off its foundation back in the ’60s, we would still be using it today,” Karl Hereth said.
“That’s mainly because our family is quite a bit into the history and trying to keep things around. We’ve remodeled all the buildings on the place to function for today’s work. I would say that if the barn was still in good shape, we would have done the same thing to it.”
The family cows now reside in a long, single-story loafing shed.
Karl Hereth said it’s a shame barns all over are sitting empty or disappearing altogether.
“Its kind of too bad they’re being taken down or not being used. But I think it’s also part of progress.
“If it can’t be used, then it either has to be remodeled into something that can be used or taken down so that a new building can be built in its place that can be used. It’s all part of growing with the times.”
The Brokofsky Farm Sultan
For years when Dawn Richards looked out her kitchen window, she saw her family’s history: a simple barn.
It had belonged to her beloved grandmother Lydia Brokofsky, a tough-as-nails farmer. Lydia shot coyotes and would grab escaped bulls by their nose rings and drag them back home. She hauled 10-gallon milk cans as well as any man and cooked, canned, baked and made lard soap on her wood stove.
She died in 2002, never having owned a modern washer or dryer.
Dawn Richards felt like crying every time she looked at Lydia’s battered barn.”The roof had been leaking badly. The hand-split cedar shingles, put on years before I was born, were rotting. The blackberry vines had grown to where you couldn’t get to the barn door, or even the barnyard itself.”
Years ago, she got some secondhand tin roofing, but other projects always seemed to put that job off.
This fall, Dawn Richards decided it was time.
With the help of her family, including her husband, John, and her father, Leo Brokofsky, she spent an emotional eight weeks and about $1,000 fixing the roof.
“We were pretty burnt out living and breathing barn by the time the roof was finished. But it was well worth the time, as the project led to stories of the barn. Dad shared some of his childhood memories … the barn was a reminder of happier times gone by.”
Dawn Richard’s great-grandparents started the 57-acre farm on Sultan Basin Road in 1928 after moving from North Dakota. It wasn’t like the other, fancier dairy farms in the valley.
Her grandfather, Otto Brokofsky, bought lumber for the family’s barn at a local mill “back when Wagley Creek carried logs under Highway 2 to the mill.”
It was always an elbow grease, bootstrap, do-what-you-can-to-scrape-by kind of farm.
“During the Depression, they raised raspberries, belonged to the Darigold co-op, had huge chicken barns and sold eggs. They used to make their own butter and sell it down at Safeway in Monroe. They did by with what they had.”
Growing up, Richards and her sisters spent weekends and summers on the farm. The girls named all the cows, hid in grain barrels, fed the barn cats fresh milk and stacked bales of hay.
Now Richards is delighted to look at her grandmother’s barn through the kitchen window each morning.
“There is a piece of my family history that will be preserved for many more years,” she said.
Reporter Jennifer Warnick: 425-339-3429 or jwarnick@ heraldnet.com.
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