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Collectibles Bring Past Home

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By CHERYL BENTLEY

The Suncoast News

Published: January 24, 2009

Picking green apples from a tree as a child and eating them, dusted with salt while sitting atop bags of feed in the family barn, is only one of a long association Audrey Horton has with barns.

When they were growing up Horton's parents, Ione and Charles Horton, both lived on Wisconsin farms that had barns. As a child, Audrey Horton played in both of them.

Although the barns have burned down now, the life they evoked is very much present in Horton's Holiday home. She has a collection of more than 300 pieces of barn-themed material.

Visitors find displays in every room, in her yard and in hidden nooks throughout her house. Her collection includes barn switch plate covers, ceramics, picture frames, fan pulls and pillows. She also has books on barns, a barn music box and barn cookie jars.

Some pieces such as a crewelwork Christmas farm scene with a barn that she bought at a yard sale for $1 evoke the passing of a way of life that has slid into history mostly unnoticed.

"I thought it was sad someone had worked so hard and so long on it, and somebody had sold it for just a dollar," she said.

Her most treasured piece is a painting of some of the buildings, including the family barn in Woodworth, Wis., west of Kenosha, where her mother grew up. Her mother commissioned an area artist to paint the scene on a plank from the old barn before it burned down.

It was in that barn where Horton ate the salted apples. "We played in Mother's barn all the time," Horton said. The barn was divided into sections for horses and cows.

Horton started her collection 15 years ago, when she bought a picture of a barn with a hay wagon that was part of a calendar whose year has long since been lost. Horton estimates the calendar dates from the 1800s.

The picture reminded her of growing up in Kenosha in a Sears mail-order house on land given to her father by his mother, who had inherited it from her father. The Sears house, built in 1927, is still in use. Today, it is rented out by Audrey Horton's brother.

Her father, Charles, started out raising cattle. Her mother, Ione, put her foot down when Charles expanded into the trucking business. She made it clear it was unacceptable for her to be left home alone taking care of the cattle.

"Make up your mind," Horton said Ione told her husband. "It's either cattle or trucking because I'm not going to milk cows."

Charles chose trucking and in time had a successful hay and grain dealership. The barn was filled with hay then, instead of cattle. It was also rented to a migrant family at one time. They appreciated the building's cement floors. Horton recalls her family's tenants gloating over their modern floor in front of other renters of less luxurious barns.

Her childhood home played an important part in Horton's adult life. She lived there for a time with her then-husband. After their divorce, she moved away but returned to live with her father during his last years before he died in 2003 at 105.

In his later years, her father divided his time between Holiday and Wisconsin.

At the end of Charles Horton's life, cattle once again roamed on the land on which he had grown up. Charles would buy cattle, fatten them up during the summer and sell them before leaving for Florida.

Charles liked to tease his daughter about her fascination with barns.

"He used to say we were going to have to build a barn in the backyard to hold all my barns," she said with a laugh.

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