If you were to stand on the current corner of Fishinger and Reed roads, then travel back in time approximately 173 years, you would find yourself on the working farm of Lewis Thomas Legg, a member of one of the founding families of Upper Arlington.

You’d likely find yourself staring straight at his timber-frame barn.

Fast-forward to 2011, and that barn is now part of the newest community facility, thanks to the Upper Arlington Community Foundation, the Upper Arlington Historical Society and area donors.

The hand-hewn timbers that have stood in Upper Arlington since the 1830s in a number of locations around the formerly-agrarian city have been reassembled and combined with new beams to form the Amelita Mirolo Barn – the newest addition to the City of Upper Arlington’s public performance and shelter space.

The beams were created through “a process where trees are felled and roughly squared to dimension with an axe, then finished with an adze or a broad axe. The timbers are then joined together to create the barn frame employing mortises and tenons, which are locked together with wooden pegs,” says Dan Troth of GreenTech Construction and a member of Friends of Ohio Barns.

Kate Erstein, executive director of the Upper Arlington Historical Society, says she was immediately taken with the barn when she saw it in 2008 at an estate auction for the belongings of Anna Marie Davidson Drake at her family’s Lane Road home.

“I am excited that we are able to save one of the oldest, if not the oldest, farming structures in Upper Arlington and use it for community gatherings,” says Erstein. “It is from the last working farm in Upper Arlington.”

Several months before the historical society acquired the barn from the auction, Erstein found herself in the archives of the fire station on Reed Road speaking to Captain Ric Beck of the Upper Arlington Fire Department, she says. After Beck, who also serves as president of Friends of Ohio Barns, paid a visit to inspect the barn, the historical society determined that the structure was worth saving as long as it could serve the community.

They disassembled the barn and kept it in storage at Upper Arlington Community Foundation trustee and Upper Arlington City Councilwoman Mary Ann Krauss’ property until they could decide what to do with it.

“The Upper Arlington Historical Society brought this preservation opportunity to the Parks and Recreation Department’s attention,” says Tim Moloney, director of the Upper Arlington Parks and Recreation Department, which will be managing the new barn facility when it is complete.

The historical society and community foundation chose to preserve the barn not because it was the most extraordinary structure in the Upper Arlington of the 1800s, but because it was like so many others.

“It was a typical barn on a family farm. It stored hay and sheltered farm animals,” says Suzanne Kull of the community foundation. The fact that the barn looks like many others did in the past is a reason why it so aptly reflects the old farming community of Upper Arlington as a whole, Kull says.

Lewis Thomas Legg, the first member of the Legg family born in Upper Arlington, built the barn on his family’s 200-acre farm in 1838, as determined by the Friends of Ohio Barns through dendrochronology – the dating of wood based on tree rings.

Legg and his family were not the only members of the Upper Arlington community to use the barn, though. The Legg family either gave or sold the barn to Clarence and Nellie Davidson, who moved the barn to 1988 Lane Rd. in 1928.

Nellie’s family had lived on the Lane Road property since her father, P.J. McCoy, built a house there in 1894. When the barn McCoy built burned down, his daughter’s family became the owners of the Legg barn.

During the time the McCoy-Davidson family used the barn, they made various improvements to create room to store farm equipment and house cattle. One such improvement was a shed. The way in which these additions were constructed – using nails instead of wooden pegs, for example – made it evident to members of the Friends of Ohio Barns that they were newer than the original section of the barn.

Periodic roof replacements and the fact that the sills were on concrete, meaning the original timber did not rest on the ground but on a concrete floor, had protected the barn’s original timber from the elements.

The Davidsons’ daughter, Anna Marie Davidson Drake, who was born in 1912 in the house her grandfather built on Lane Road, was the last family member to use the barn for farming until shortly after 1964, when the city prohibited farm animals within the city limits.

“There are people still living in the community today who remember buying eggs out of this barn,” Kull says. Preserving the barn is important “to remind Upper Arlington residents of their agricultural beginnings,” she says.

The barn has now been moved from its original home, restored and expanded in Sunny 95 Park for the community to enjoy.

“The story is the community is coming together to build something for the community,” says Moloney.

Katie Carns is a contributing writer for Tri-Village Magazine.

Upper Arlington’s new Amelita Mirolo Barn will officially be unveiled to the community at the city’s annual Spring Fling celebration.

Time: 11 a.m.-2 p.m., official ceremony at noon

Where: Sunny 95 Park, 4395 Carriage Hill Ln.

What: This event will function not only as a celebration of the barn’s rebirth, but also as the Upper Arlington Community Foundation’s formal gifting of the barn to the city of Upper Arlington.

The Upper Arlington Community Foundation will turn the keys over to the Upper Arlington Parks and Recreation Department, which will manage community activities at the barn and maintain the facility for rentals.

Tim Moloney, director of the Parks and Recreation Department, says the department's “highest demand has been for a nice, reservable space for indoor activities" – a demand that will be satisfied by the all-seasons Amelita Mirolo Barn.

The new barn will be used for programming, including lecture series, a summer theatre camp and the eight-part Music in the Parks series, he says.   

“The reasons for my excitement are almost too numerous to mention, but it almost goes without saying that this is a true community effort,” Moloney says. “I have never been involved in a project where the community has taken on such an effort and made it happen.”

Preserving the barn while improving it to accommodate the needs of present-day Upper Arlington serves as a nod to both the city’s past and future.

"The Upper Arlington Community Foundation is public service at its best,” says Sue Ralph, foundation executive director. “Through the generosity and creativity of Upper Arlington citizens and businesses, we have built this beautiful structure for generations to enjoy.”

• On Sept. 17, 2010, about 25 representatives from the New Hampshire-based Timber Framers Guild arrived in Upper Arlington to reassemble 109 pieces from the old barn and add three new sections of 215 pieces of Douglas Fir prepared by Vermont Timber Works, a company specializing in hand-hewn beams, merging new and old to form the new performance and shelter space.
  
  
• Other areas of the new facility include a catering kitchen, the UA Arts Stage, the Northwest Kiwanis Jake Will Amphitheater, the Upper Arlington Rotary Club Patio and the Robert S. Crane Memorial Garden.
  
  
• The barn is named after Amelita Mirolo, a philanthropist who ran the business started by her Italian immigrant father, the Columbus-based Ardit Mosaic Tile & Marble Co., until she sold it and retired in 1991. Having always been active in the arts, education, medicine and her church, she formed the Mirolo Foundation in 1993 before passing away in 2006.
  
  
• The completed Amelita Mirolo Barn is 3,700 square feet.
  
  
• More than 250 area residents have contributed money, ranging from $10 to $150,000 – the latter amount being a gift from the Mirolo Charitable Foundation.
  
  
• The 2,000-square-foot main space holds up to 140 people with the room set banquet style, 200 theater style and 112 in a classroom format.