2024 Barn Tour & Annual Meeting
Friday, June 7 – Sunday, June 9, 2024
Please join HBFF for our 2024 Barn Tour and Annual Meeting in the Perkiomen Valley of southeastern Pennsylvania, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, June 7 through 9. We will be touring barns and structures in three counties on nine sites that range from a 1757 Colonial mansion to a 1909 bank barn with a massive forebay truss system. This year’s tour is a mix of working farms, historic sites, and private residential properties. All of our tour stops will illustrate a long tradition of agriculture in each of the major watersheds of the Perkiomen Valley. Factors such as transportation networks, the proximity to urban areas, and technological developments all played a role in the growth of local farming in the Perkiomen region. In addition, there are various common threads running through different sets of tour sites, such as closeness to significant creeks, the presence of mill structures, former dairying activities, Germanic roof framing, major additions or alterations to barns, and preserved farmland.
Our headquarters for Friday’s registration, dinner, and Annual Meeting will be the Schwenkfelder Library and Heritage Center in Pennsburg, Montgomery County. Friday will also feature a drive-on-your-own tour of a working farm near Hosensack, Lehigh County and a historic house near Sumneytown along the Ridge Valley Creek. Following our Annual Meeting, we will have a panel discussion exploring farming in the Perkiomen Valley, past and present, local farmland preservation, and the conservation of farm structures and artifacts with some long-time area residents with experience in these topics.
The Saturday bus tour (via school buses) will visit five barns in different parts of the Perkiomen Valley with a lunch stop at the Mennonite Heritage Center in Harleysville. Sunday will be a casual drive-on-your-own tour of two additional barns in the mid-Skippack Valley in central Montgomery County. One of these is on a small horse farm, and the other is a vernacular museum preserving antique tools, equipment, and other ephemera of local agrarian heritage. Details for tour registration can be found in the links below. Please have your registration postmarked by May 7, 2024. We hope to see you in June!
Douglas A. Rotondo
2024 Tour Coordinator & HBFF Secretary