GRAY, Maine — With bright red doors, cedar shingles and colorful flowers sprouting from vintage milk cans, The Barn on 26 antiques shop is a cheerful sight.
Inside the restored 1820s Shaker-style barn pushed back from a well-traveled road, restored Victorian furniture, oak tables, braided rugs and wicker seem right at home. The horses galloping around the property add to the allure.
“A lot of people stop because it’s a barn and they are curious,” said proprietor Alice Welch. “They say, ‘I love this barn, I would live here.’”
Across New England, barns and antiques are natural bedfellows — but they don’t always marry well.
“Some old barns with antiques have a musty smell,” said Welch.
This barn is breezy and fresh, carrying the faint, earthy air of animals from decades gone by. Instead of moos and manure, gentle music, gumdrops arranged in a period dish and the occasional ringing of a classic rotary phone attached to a wooden post set a peaceful, pastoral scene.
Sure, you can score some of her finds, such as vintage pillow back chairs, on eBay, but “the charm of an old barn is something you can’t reproduce,” said Welch.
That charm was not always front and center.
When the New Hampshire native stumbled across the barn with a detached farmhouse in 1977, it was far from a looker. The roof was leaning 17 inches in one direction. The floors were dirt, and the structure cried out for help.
“It was January and I walked to the barn in snowshoes,” the 68-year-old recalled.
“It was a monumental project,” said Welch, who took it on with her late-husband. “I was 30 years old and filled with youthful energy.”
She hired a Portland contractor who moved the roof an inch a day.
“They started at the top and worked their way down,” said Welch.
Much of the original material was used to restore the barn, which once housed sheep and cows. Welch added a hemlock floor and united the upper lofts with a center floorboard. Now the taut and tidy barn is filled with well-curated finds — from Native American rugs to tea cups — which makes for a nice browsing experience.
Some years later, an addition was added to the back of the barn to house her horses. That arrangement lasted a few years.
“Sometimes they would kick the wall, and the whole place would shake,” said Welch, who sold those horses and now owns two others that reside in a nearby training stable.
Amid the hall tree, secretary’s desk and Tiffany lamps, one of Welch’s favorite relics is not for sale.
What looks like a newel post to the uninitiated is actually a key symbol of this barn’s past.
Written in lead is “December 7, 1894” and the words “red heifer” in loopy script. Underneath is “April 22, 1895.”
Welch, who grew up on a dairy farm, shows guests the area where she rescued the beam and mimics what she suspects happened.
“They reached up and wrote the dates likely when the animal was born and bred,” she said. “Instead of a written logs they used beams.”
Like the restored furniture and curios she sells, the barn itself is a living antique Welch has nurtured and cherished.
“It’s kind of like a dream come true for me,” said Welch, who doesn’t view running an antiques shop as a job because “I love being in the shop.” If her business wasn’t based in a barn “it would be like going to work everyday,” she said.
