Strong Family Farm receives Barn Savers Award

The Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation announces “Barn Saver” Awards given on June 7, 2013 at the Connecticut Trust’s “Celebration of Barns” gala held at Bushnell Farm in Old Saybrook.

The purpose was to honor several Connecticut barn owners who have worked tirelessly to restore or repair their historic barns and who are finding creative ways of keeping those barns in productive use.

One of the three awards went to the Strong Family Farm, 274 West Street, Vernon CT

This is an outstanding intact example of an early 20th-century gambrel-roofed dairy barn. The original materials have been well maintained and are intact. Even the cow stanchions remain in their original location. The hay fork, purchased from Star Hardware, a local store, continues to hang from the track along the ridge of the roof. The property gains significance due to its association with the Strong Family. This prominent family has owned the property for well over 100 years and continues to operate one of the last running farms in the area.

N. Morgan Strong was already the third generation of the Strong family to work this farmland when in July of 1917 the barn was destroyed by fire, killing a team of horses and numerous pigs. His father and grandfather had been a carpenter and a painter, with farming a necessary supplement to the family income.

N. Morgan Strong decided to build a new structure, the historic barn of today, set further back from the road in the apple orchard. For the foundation and flooring he used wood from chestnut trees that had died of blight. The barn retained the traditional English barn layout with its eave-entry doors in the north side, while including a modern gambrel roof and the balloon framing that was becoming standard construction practice.

During the late 1930s, N. Morgan and his son Norman Randall Strong partnered to run the farm. Norman Randall refused to work without a tractor, so they purchased their first Ford tractor, and sold the workhorses. Horse stalls were replaced by cow stalls and calf pens. Norman Randall Strong married Geraldine Risley in August of 1942. They had three children, Carol, Morgan, and Nancy.

In the early 1950s, N. Morgan Strong went to work for the State Department of Agriculture, and Norman Randall Strong took over running the farm with the help of a neighbor farmer, Fred Ecker. In 1965, Norman Randall Strong sadly sold his dairy cows and started work as the Superintendent of Grove Hill Cemetery. His daughter, Carol Strong, had raised some turkeys as a 4-H project. That led to a new line which continued into the 2000s. The Strong Farm was the last working family-owned farm in Vernon as the town became increasingly suburbanized.

Norman Randall Strong died in 2010 and since that time, Nancy Strong has been working to establish the Strong Family Farm as a non-profit educational center where families and groups can experience a historical farm environment. With the assistance of a Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation barn grant, she has been able to reroof the barn while planning for the future educational center and advocating for a property tax abatement program for barns.

For more information on this and the new Barns Trail map, please contact

Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation

940 Whitney Avenue

Hamden, CT 06517

(203) 562-6312

www.cttrust.org