“Watcha got in the back of your truck there pal?”

“It’s an eleven-sided chestnut silo that we just took down. I’m on my way to the top of a mountain to put her back up.”

“Oh, I see.”

Originally posted 2015-05-05 11:23:49.

The silo grew shorter…

And shorter…

Until it was gone.

Originally posted 2015-05-05 11:14:13.

This silo is the largest stack of chestnut lumber that I will ever see… it’s certainly, the tallest.

Over two thousand individual boards make up this structure, each laid down flat, one upon the other, just a like brickwork. And every board would have five nails driven down through it and into the course below it, thus securing it tightly. And then, another nail was driven into each end of every board… for good measure.

The two men chosen to take this silo down and re-erect it later, both fine carpenters, would begin to refer to themselves as “wood masons” after working a few days on this project.

They were likely the only two wood-masons in America at the time.

Originally posted 2015-05-05 10:59:45.

Here’s a photo of the original ladder that the farmer would have used to climb up and into the silo. It was located in the area between the barn and the silo.

I climbed that ladder once.

That was enough.

It’s amazing how much harder a truly vertical ladder is to climb when compared to a leaning ladder that those of us in construction often use.

There is simply no opportunity for upper body rest on a vertical ladder. And, to some degree, a person’s knees need to be bent out to the side.

I have often carried something up in my hand when climbing a leaning ladder (a saw or a piece of lumber). Sometimes I’ve used both hands and walked a ladder like I would a staircase… that can’t be done when a ladder is built straight up and down.

The goal when using a ladder like this is to get where you are going as swiftly as you can. Or better yet, get someone else to go up there. lol

Originally posted 2015-05-05 10:38:45.

You likely won’t see another photo like this online today…

Once we got the roof off of the silo it was time to set up a stack of scaffolding on the inside of the silo. We’d pull up each piece by rope on the outside and then lower it down to the bottom on the inside where we would assemble it. We would work from this scaffolding to disassemble the more that 2,000 boards that made up the silo.

But there was a problem.

It was early Spring and at the bottom of the silo there was a frozen slab of ice left over from Winter. It was a deep layer of ice and from what we could tell it was at least a foot thick, there was an odd mixture of things we could see frozen in this slab, from the ladder that can be seen in the photo, to a raccoon that you cannot see.

The thing we did not know is how deep this layer of ice might be. We had this unsettling thought in the back of our minds that this was perhaps a frozen layer of ice on top of a well.

The entire time we worked on top of this ice sheet we had this ongoing concern that at any moment our scaffolding would suddenly break through this layer of ice and vanish into the unknown depths of an imagined well…. carrying us along with it.

It was a couple weeks later, after we had finished taking down the silo, that this slab of ice completely melted revealing a concrete floor about a foot below the ice.

And, for all you animal lovers out there… we gave that raccoon a proper burial.

We did our best to pray him out of purgatory and into those heavenly gates.

Originally posted 2015-05-04 18:38:53.

How would you like to climb this ladder multiple times throughout your work day?

Originally posted 2015-05-04 14:07:56.

Underneath the roof sheathing we found a clever method of bringing eleven different rafters to a single point. Not bad of an old country boy to put together… forty feet up in the air… nearly a hundred years ago.

Originally posted 2015-05-04 03:17:02.

And then, we found this under the metal roofing.

I had never before considered that sheathing a roof could create a piece of artwork… until I saw this.

What I witnessed at the peak of this silo rivaled many of the creations that I have seen hang on museum walls.

Originally posted 2015-05-04 03:10:11.

The amount of work and the skill level needed to create a complex metal roof like this kept us humble. A piece of artwork.. all the way up here on the top of silo… where no one would ever see or appreciate it.

Originally posted 2015-05-04 02:55:48.

Our first goal in taking the silo down, is to remove the roof.

In order for it to come down, we must go up.

It’s a long way up there.

The view is spectacular.

The only tools needed was a crowbar, and a camera.

Originally posted 2015-05-04 02:47:15.