Old Mission Farm Honored with ‘Barn of the Year’ Award

During the ten years that I’ve been publishing Old Mission Gazette, I’ve written a lot about the Johnson Farms barn where I basically grew up. Located on Center Road about a half-mile north of Mapleton, I spent a good portion of my childhood years in that barn — tending to my horse Copper, playing in the hayloft, helping to put up hay and doing other chores.

This year, that barn — which is still in our family and owned by my brother and sister-in-law, Dean and Laura Johnson — was honored with the “Barn of the Year” award from the Michigan Barn Preservation Network.

Each year, the Michigan Barn Preservation Network honors barns that support the group’s ongoing mission to preserve Michigan’s agricultural heritage exemplified by its barns. The awards recognize barn owners who have made the extra effort to maintain or restore historic barns. In the past 28 years of the award’s existence, 108 Michigan barns have been recognized for their unique qualities and/or preservation efforts.

Two barns and their owners were awarded the “Barn of the Year” designation for 2024 at the group’s annual conference in East Lansing earlier this year. One was the Nelson Family Barn located in Ada in Kent County. Owned by Michael and Tricia Nelson, the barn received the “Family Adaptive Use” award. The Nelsons rescued and restored the gambrel-roofed barn — along with the silo, milk house, hen house/chicken coop and garage/shop — that had been in the same family since the 1850s. The restoration took place in 2023, and was the location for their son’s wedding last August.

The other “Barn of the Year” award went to Dean and Laura for their work in maintaining and restoring our family barn where I spent my childhood. The big red barn won the “Continuing Agriculture” award, as they continue to use it in their current farming operations growing apples, cherries and other produce.

When I interviewed my dad, Walter Johnson, about the barn before he passed away in 2004, he said the barn was most likely built around 1880 by Robert Edgecomb, a Civil War veteran and the father-in-law of Dad’s mother, Stella Smith. Stella grew up in the hollow just to the north of the barn, where the Cosgrove family lived all the time I was growing up. Stella married Frank Edgecomb, Robert’s son.

When Frank passed away during World War One from the Spanish Flu, Stella ran the farm by herself until she married the hired hand, Lester Johnson, my grandfather. Lester – whose family lived in Kingsley – had hitchhiked out on the Old Mission Peninsula looking for work. He and Stella were married on August 31, 1922. They had two boys, Walter and Guy Johnson, who were half-siblings to Stella and Frank’s children, Gladys and Fred Edgecomb.

You can’t miss the big red barn located on the crest of the hill north of Mapleton; in fact, the farm’s original name was “Crescent Hill Fruit Farms.” It’s situated on an 80-acre parcel that now grows apples and cherries. When I was a kid, my mom’s strawberry field was located at the bottom of the hill behind the barn. Some of you reading this likely picked strawberries for my mom and helped load them into our 1966 VW Bus to be delivered around town — including Big Boy for their strawberry pie.

The barn is 50′ x 55′ and features a gable roof with a long-sloping shed roof extending down one side, which isn’t typical of other barns on the Old Mission Peninsula. It has a fieldstone foundation built with some whole and some split stone. The milled wood siding is painted red with white trim, and a quilt square adorns the north side. This was part of Evelyn Johnson’s “Barn Quilt” project which evolved into her book, “Barns of Old Mission Peninsula.” There was once a silo on the barn, and a cupola, which Dad said blew off in a windstorm.

Here’s a photo of the barn in the early 1900s compared to what it looks like today. That’s Center Road before it was paved. The old farmhouse across the road burned down in 1964, but the home’s little garage is still there.

During the past 140 years since the barn was built, the economy and culture of the Old Mission Peninsula has changed a lot. The old barn has seen dairy cows, feeder cattle, feeder calves, feeder pigs, stalls for work horses and, later, saddle horses like my Morgan horse, Copper, and Dean’s Appaloosa, Skipper. Cherry and apple farming eventually took over, and today, the barn stores the tractors, spray rigs and ladders used in Johnson Farms’ current farming operation.

While so many barns across our Michigan landscape are crumbling and disappearing, the Johnson Farms barn has survived, not through divine intervention, but from diligent maintenance through six generations of the same family.

Some of the maintenance and restoration includes an upgrade to the electrical system; installation of new windows; installation of a new ribbed steel roof, replacing the aluminum corrugated roof that had deteriorated due to age and incompatible fasteners; and new seamless gutters and gutter guards, alleviating the need to clean the gutters by hand every year (thank goodness).

Also, the large sliding doors and door tracks have been replaced, and a barn painter comes around every few years and re-paints the wood siding. The east wall, which was progressively deteriorating, has been covered in ribbed steel and the foundation shored up.

Here are a few photos of the maintenance and restoration through the years. Big thanks to Dean and Laura for preserving our family barn and agricultural heritage on the Old Mission Peninsula.

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