PORT ANGELES — They were authentic before “authentic” was in.
The barns of Dungeness Valley — the big, the medium-size, the falling-down — have long fascinated Cat Bennett of Sequim.
So the artist and semiretired computer systems analyst began shooting and collecting photographs of them — and learning their back stories.
And now, after many of the barns have been burned or torn down, Bennett has preserved their memories on a prairie of a website, www.DungenessBarns.com.
The site has hundreds, from the Mantle barn that used to be at the corner of Sequim-Dungeness Way and Port Williams Road to the Sofie barn that still stands on Palo Alto Road.
There are also the 120-year-old Wayside Farm barn, now the Olympic Cellars winery on U.S. Highway 101, and the Cedarfield barn, which once presided over an ostrich farm.
It’s become a horse-boarding facility and the venue for the Five Acre School’s “Beat the Blues” barn dance in February.
Presentation today
This afternoon, Bennett and Bob Clark, a lifelong resident of the valley, will give a free, illustrated presentation on about 75 of the barns they know.
The hourlong program opens the History Tales series from the Clallam County Historical Society, and will start at 2:30 p.m. in the Port Angeles City Council chambers, 321 E. Fifth St.
“She has the pictures and the facts. And I enlarge on the facts,” Clark promised.
He knows from barns; in his nearly 80 years of living in the valley, Clark has worked in many of them, and watched dozens give way to gravity or hay fires.
Not his, though: the Clark family’s barn, a 48-foot-high structure built in 1922, is the storage space for several generations’ worth of stuff.
“My father was Scots. He didn’t get rid of anything,” Clark said. “I inherited that trait.”
What is it about barns that captivated Bennett, who was a Southern California girl before moving to Sequim 16 years ago?
‘Honest buildings’
“They’re honest buildings. They work hard; they do their job with no extra fluff,” she said.
The ones that still stand, she added, are a reflection of the region’s dairy-rich past.
“What I’m trying to show,” Bennett said, “is how we’ve changed,” as the barnscape has.
Several on her website are labeled “GONE!”, such as the Heath barn, demolished to make way for a housing tract near Spyglass and Keeler roads, the Priest barn, which stood where the Jennie’s Meadow development is now, and the Kerby-Evans barn on East Washington Street, whose silo stands beside a real estate office.
In one case, however, the barn was demolished but the milk house was left intact.
That’s the Rex McInnes barn, the moss-topped building that once stood on the east side of Taylor Ranch Road north of Woodcock Road.
Today the surrounding land is leased to Nash’s Organic Produce, which grows vegetables on it.
Bennett and Clark gave a similar presentation on barns last January at the Old Dungeness Schoolhouse, and met many fellow fans of the old farm buildings.
“A lot are like me: They saw them but they didn’t see them,” said Bennett, 60.
Sequim’s history
And to her mind, those hulking structures, homely as they might be, represent one of the sweeter aspects of Sequim’s history.
Which makes her hungry for more.
“I want people to continue to visit the website, and if they know something about a barn, let me know about it,” she added.
“The best way to preserve historical knowledge is to share it as widely as possible.”
Each page of Bennett’s website provides a link to her e-mail address, barninfo@Dungeness Barns.com.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3550 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
