Barn restored for art’s sake

UNIONTOWN, Wash. – It’s rugged and rusty, yet it seems to bloom right out of the ground – more than 1,000 iron wheels wedged in the tall grass, rounding up the dairy barn, and rolling over the prairie hill into the horizon.

The wheel fence in this Whitman County town is about as country as it gets.

But the oft-photographed fence isn’t for keeping in the cattle anymore. It’s for drawing tourists to the artist studios now being built inside the old Dahmen barn.

It’s part of the Uniontown Community Development Association’s renovation project to breathe life into the dilapidated structure.

Steve and Junette Dahmen donated the fence and the barn to the people they knew would really take care of them – their neighbors.

The 12 studios will be open so visitors can watch the artists in action, according to UCDA spokeswoman Leslee Miller. She hopes to find a variety of local artists and artisans, from painters and sculptors to blacksmiths and woodworkers, to fill the space.

“We have tons of arts people out there and they don’t have much opportunity to share their work,” Miller said.

The studios will be available to Washington and Idaho artists from Whitman, Latah, Nez Perce and Asotin counties.

There will also be classroom space for workshops, a retail space for local art and an area cleared for the occasional barn dance.

And because the barn is visible from Highway 195 on the southern stretch of the Palouse Scenic Byway, Miller said, it’s destined to become a visitor information center.

The barn and the wheel fence are already landmarks in their own right, Miller said. The art space would capitalize on that fame.

The building was originally a milking barn, built in 1935 by Steve Dahmen’s uncle, Jack Dahmen. The family left the dairy business in 1958, and the barn was used to house beef cattle, a clutch of chickens and a few cats.

Around 1970, Steve Dahmen put the first wheel in the ground for his now-famous fence. Friends gave him wheels from their junk piles, and ads in local papers brought in even more – wheels from threshing machines, steam engines, tractors and baby buggies. The wheels kept coming until Dahmen had fenced in about three acres.

The fence got better with age, but the barn had suffered over the years.

By 2004, the wind-blown barn leaned 6 inches to the east and bulged in the middle. It was virtually empty, save for a layer of pigeon poop on the second floor that Junette Dahmen swears was a foot deep.

When cleanup time came, neighbor Sharon Dixon did most of the shoveling.

“She really had it in for those pigeons,” Junette Dahmen said.

Dixon, Uniontown’s master quilter, also spent 275 hours this winter making a barn-themed quilt for a UCDA fundraiser.

Residents in this town of 345 have donated more than $30,000 in cash and materials for the project. UCDA logs nearly 1,500 hours of volunteer time so far.

And that’s not counting Marv Entel, a retired insurance adjuster and volunteer general contractor for the project. He does it for the love of preservation, he said.

He hoisted the barn and replaced the foundation, and he added new steel cross-bracing to keep the structure standing, even in 125-mph wind.

But the original pine crossbeams are still intact, and the vaulted barrel truss ceiling will remain exposed, ensuring that no matter how much renovation Entel does, the barn will still look like a barn.

UCDA will host its first preview of the art studios Sunday, in conjunction with the 53rd annual Uniontown Sausage Feed, a project that benefits the local community building. Local volunteers also pitched in to build a park and ball field in 1996.

“The community just rallies when you have something to do out here,” Miller said.