-Submitted photo
This O'Brien County barn is just inside the county line from Granville and was built in 1912. The Ascherl family has preserved the barn in part with funds awarded by the Iowa Barn Foundation.

GRANVILLE — Joe and Donna Ascherl own this majestic barn, which is on the other side of the road into O’Brien County.

“In 1997, we moved to northwest Iowa because we both have farm backgrounds and wanted to raise our kids on a farm,” said Joe Ascherl. “The barn was still in great shape, but I could tell if we didn’t do something it would fall. That’s when my wife’s father told me about the Iowa Barn Foundation.”

The Ascherls received their first Foundation award in 2006. With assistance from that grant, the Ascherls painted the barn and roofed it, among other jobs that included repainting the “Z’s” on the interior of the split doors.

The inside of the barn is the same as it was when constructed except for Ascherl’s addition of stairs up to the loft. The barn was built using post-and-beam construction and mortise-and-tenon joints held in place with wood pegs. The building measures 40 feet wide by 60 feet long with a 40-foot peak. At the center of the roof is an all-wood cupola paired with the barn’s original lightning rods.

“The milking stanchions and birthing pens are on the east side of the barn,” said Ascherl. “In the middle is a drop-center loft. On the west side of the barn are the stalls for teams of horses, and there’s a bullpen on the southwest corner of the barn.

“We used the barn primarily for 4-H animals. We had rabbits, peacocks, sheep, calves, llamas, and goats. There were lots of kittens born in that barn.”

The Ascherls bought the barn from Arnold and Clara Hoefler; Arnold’s parents Bernard and Elizabeth had farmsteaded the land where the barn resides in the 1870s. Bernard had the multi-purpose barn built in 1912 before the main house was built, as the farm work needed to be tended to first. The original farm home is on the property as well.

“A big portion of obtaining the grant was how much we had found out about our place through Arnold,” said Ascherl. “Arnold told me that, when he was a kid, farming was labor intensive, and power came from their team of horses.

“I asked him — Arnold was in his 90s when we moved in — how many bales of hay the barn would hold. He chuckled and said, ‘We never baled. It was always loose hay.’ His family would bring the hay in from the racks using the set of grappling hooks that I still have in the barn. The barn has a grain bin in the upper half where — after shocking the oats — they would store 1,200 bushels of them for the horses and cattle; the bin had a gravity feed which in the early 1900s was an ingenious mechanism.”

Aside from raising livestock, the Hoeflers also worked 320 acres of land, planting corn, oats, and alfalfa.

“The Hoeflers were true pioneers of agriculture in northwest Iowa,” said Ascherl.