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We're at the
Boyer farmstead and behind me is the Boyer barn which was built in 1860 it's
one of the oldest barns
still standing within Ebey's Reserve as well as Whidbey island
The Boyer barn is part of what we're calling our community restoration project or what we're calling
our
another form of a community barn-raising
Instead of the community coming together to
build a new barn what we've done is we've teamed up National Park
Service staff and the community
to help restore one of our historic buildings
every season, every year.
You could hardly walk in here when we first got to the site last summer. I think one of the greatest
images I remember is the old farm truck International Harvester sitting out here
and folks in here with pitchforks throwing the hay
out of the barn, fifty or sixty years after it had been placed in the barn.
And that great circle and what I certainly recognized
was that you know every generation has its job
And part of the job of this generation
is to help restore these heritage buildings and find new uses for them.
So behind me is the Jacob Ebey House that was
was built in the mid 1800's
and it's a excellent example of
adaptive reuse.
This will eventually be a visitor contact center
So the the reserve was established in 1978. it was America's first
National Historical Reserve
and it really came about because Ebey's Prairie
was slated for development. When the community saw those five acre homesites
for sale and signs up in roadways that had been placed in the landscape
they really sort of woke up and said
"You know we don't want our community to become like so many other communities
across the country." We want to
really protect this resource and for the first ten years after the Reserve was
established, the National Park Service
worked with the local community to create and
establish the first Conservation Plan.
This is the interior of the Ferry House
Back when we were doing the initial stabilization
we constructed some temporary two by six walls
and what this does is it stabilizes
the structure of the building in a way that
enables us to buy some time to come up with a more permanent solution.
So here's a
historic building element from last century
1800's when
they would use newspaper to cover cracks between the boards
to insulate it to some extent. It's pretty
wild to come to a place like this and
think, "Oh yeah, this actually happened here."
And so when you look across the landscape across Ebey's Prairie or
Crockett Prairie or in downtown Coupeville, you're connected
through generations back into the 1800's or even beyond and
before that to the early exploration of Puget Sound. So when you think about
how Puget Sound was settled and what the pioneer experience was
and what the Indian experience was before that time that's
evidence that experience and that human impact connection
and evidence is still here within Ebey's Reserve.
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