---
title: Structural Damage
date: 2023-02-03T12:11:00-05:00
author: University of Maryland
canonical_url: "https://terp.umd.edu/structural-damage"
section: Articles
---
# Structural Damage

*February 3, 2023* — by [Sala Levin ’10](/authors/sala-levin-10)


- *Photos by Stephanie S. Cordle*

> Maryland’s vanishing tobacco barns represent the vestiges of slavery and a legacy of disease. UMD historic preservationists are racing to document them anyway.

*Maryland’s vanishing tobacco barn is surrounded by trees*

**WINDING ALONG THE WOODED OR** wide-open roads of Southern Maryland, you might one day find a ghost. It takes some searching, but after parking on a rutted, muddy path or a patch of thin gravel, then high-stepping over knee-length grasses to some secluded spot, you may come across a dilapidated wood barn.

With its characteristic heavy timber frame and internal horizontal poles for hanging the tobacco leaves to cure, the barn recalls the Southern Maryland of centuries ago: thick forests, ships coming and going on the region’s many rivers and tributaries, and fields erupting in the wide leaves of the tobacco plant.

Tobacco barns were once ubiquitous, visible signs of the crop’s grip on the economy and day-to-day life of St. Mary’s, Charles, Calvert, Anne Arundel and Prince George’s counties, where enslaved people did the exhausting work of harvesting and drying.

But since the deadly effects of tobacco became widely known, the barns have fallen into disuse and disrepair, their unique structure rendering them good for no other money-making pursuits. The 2000 launch of the state’s Tobacco Crop Conversion Program, commonly known as the tobacco buyout, signaled Maryland’s official stance on tobacco farming: No more. Four years later, the National Trust for Historic Preservation ranked Southern Maryland’s tobacco barns among the most endangered historic places in the U.S.


*Dennis Pogue examines tobacco barn — Dennis Pogue, associate research professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, examines a tobacco barn in La Plata, Md., (here and above) as part of his project to document every remaining such structure in the state.*


*tobacco barn among trees — The Chelsea barn, located in Upper Marlboro’s Watkins Regional Park, was built around 1860.*


Allison Luthern, the nonprofit’s architectural survey administrator, calls the barns “highly endangered resources.” “If you want to capture information about these buildings before they’re gone, survey is the way you do that.”

Pogue drives through the state, knocking on homeowners’ doors to ask if he can check out their decrepit barn out back. He asks if they know of any other tobacco barns. Usually, they don’t.

Once he’s granted access, Pogue starts taking notes and sketching. He inspects the barn’s wood poles and joints, determining from the surface of the wood whether they were cut with a circular saw or a pit saw and whether the nails used are made by hand or machine. He measures the poles spanning the width and length of the barn, and their distance from one another. He finds the vents needed to allow the tobacco to air dry over the fall and winter.


*tobacco barn with blue sky above — The Sims-Bond tobacco barn (above and below, right) was built between 1835 and 1845 by John F. Sims.*


*closeup showing wood detail in tobacco barn*


*man holds log — Located in what’s now Greenwell State Park in St. Mary’s County, the Sims-Bond barn is the state’s only remaining one constructed from hand-hewn logs and pegs.*


*open barn door — A door opens to the Chelsea barn in Watkins Regional Park.*







**Issue:** [Winter 2023](https://terp.umd.edu/editions/winter-2023)


**Types:** [Features](https://terp.umd.edu/category/features)