Octagon Barn in Kentucky

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Henry Bird was a son of Philemon Bird, owner of the property across from this site. Philemon Bird gave each of his children 100 acres, and Henry acquired this site. The present dwelling on this site was constructed in 1896. The mule barn was built in 1880, or possibly earlier. He sold mules to the army and "down south". The barn housed up to forty mules at any one time. There was a narrow aisle, and a central round trough so that each mule could be fed at the same time from one piece. Their heads came together. The farm was inherited by Tate Bird, youngest of Henry's seven children, who operated a dairy farm and added to the barn. Originally he bottled and sold raw milk until regulations required homogenization. Tate Bird operated a retail milk business from ca. 1935 to ca. 1965, selling homogenized milk. He had three delivery trucks, and sold milk throughout Shelby County and as far as St. Matthews in eastern Jefferson County. Eventually expanded to sell chocolate milk and Byerly's orangeade.

Barn Description

The building is a octagonal frame barn. The ground floor has been extensively from its original configuration. The loft area is mostly original. Inner octagon of posts provides intermediate support for a common rafter roof. The cupola in the center is carried on a compression ring. Evidence of 9 foot-wide aisle includes change in loft floor level and beams spanning its location to carry posts above which would have impeded movement through it. The barn is similar in several respects to dairy barns in New York State, showing influence of late nineteenth-century publications of agricultural societies and promoters of octagonal barns as economical and efficient forms to build and operate. It may have had a combination of a central plan with a transverse aisle. There are scalloped vergeboards around barn above vertical-board siding on barn and central cupola. The roof is asphalt shingle. There is a rectangular frame dairy barn addition to north with connected silos, and a concrete block dairy barn extension to the west.