I’ve never lifted a barn, but Herman Ostry, a farmer in Bruno, Nebraska has. Shortly after buying a piece of land and a barn, a nearby creek rose, and the barn was under twenty nine inches of water. He half-jokingly said to his family, ‘I bet if we had enough people, we could pick up that barn and carry it to higher ground.’ To his surprise, one of his sons, Mike, started thinking about it, and by counting the number of boards, timbers, and nails, he estimated that the barn weighed about 19,000 pounds. Mike figured that three hundred forty four people would only have to lift about fifty-five pounds to carry the barn to higher ground.
But how do that many people get a grip on the barn in order to lift it? Mike ingeniously designed a grid of steel tubing and attached it to the inside and outside of the barn. This provided handles for the ‘barn raisers.’ As the town of Bruno was planning its centennial activities, Herman suggested a ‘barn raising’ as part of the celebration. As the centennial approached word of the ‘barn raising’ spread far beyond Bruno. On the morning of the lift, July 30,1988, nearly four hundred thousand people from eleven states were there. When everything was ready, Herman counted, ‘one, two,three.’ The
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