Passersby last week saw work on the historic Ellis Barn, but the work is not that of demolition.
‘Barnwrights? are involved in the meticulous ‘disassembly? of the barn located on Dixie Highway in Springfield Township. Workers are labeling materials for transport to the Springfield Oaks County Park, where the barn will be reassembled.
Jon Noyes, landscape designer for Oakland County Parks, said last week that experts from CLR Inc. of Indiana are more than 40 percent finished with the disassembly phase, although the view from the exterior does not fully reflect the progress.
‘Because they are focusing on one section of the barn at a time, the barn is at a very interesting stage,? Noyes said. ‘From one vantage point, you can still see the barn much as it has been with siding and roof intact; from another view it looks like the bones of some great whale.?
The barn contained several horse stalls, tack rooms and granaries, each requiring detailed documentation and disassembly of hundreds of linear feet of material, Noyes said.
Barnwrights plan to finish disassembly and begin reassembly in May, with hopes to have most of it rebuilt in time for this year’s 4-H Fair in July.
The two-story, 14,000-square-foot barn is part of a 78-acre parcel previously owned by the Ellis family.
Currently owned by RBI 33 LLC, a development company run by former major league baseball players Tim Birtsas and Kirk Gibson, the barn was donated to Oakland County Parks. The duo approached the parks system four years ago to launch the rehabilitation project.
To pay for the project, Oakland County Parks worked with the Road Commission for Oakland County to secure $600,000 in grant funding through the Michigan Department of Transportation’s Transportation Enhancement Program. The TE program promotes, among other things, historic preservation.