RUMFORD – As young boys, Berl and Robert Nisbet remember many hours playing in their family’s old barn on Isthmus Road. Berl remembers the fun he had sliding down its metal roof in the winter.
The memories are all they have now after the 150-year-old structure was taken down Monday for insurance reasons. There is a pile of rubble beside and behind the farmhouse, which is owned by Berl Nisbet and his family. Boards and beams in good-enough shape will be reused. The rest will become fill.
“I have mixed feelings about it,” Berl Nisbet said Monday afternoon. “I grew up here and played in the barn as a kid.”
Three generations of Nisbets have lived in the farmhouse and used the old barn in one way or another.
Berl’s grandfather, Robert, immigrated to the area in the early 1900s from Prince Edward Island. He raised dairy cattle and sold milk to people on Franklin Street.
Berl’s father, also named Robert, and his wife, June, also raised cattle and horses that were housed in the barn. A second, smaller barn had once been an active part of the family farm. It collapsed in the 1970s.
But since Berl Nisbet became the owner, the larger barn, which was attached to the house, has been used for storage or as a workshop. Nisbet works as a millwright for Irving Forest Products Inc. in Dixfield.
A neighbor, Harry Powers, said the barn was originally built at a homestead known as the Paris settlement on a small mountain on an old county road about three-quarters of a mile from the Nisbet home. He said the barn was disassembled in the 1920s and brought to the Isthmus Road site, where it was rebuilt.
Berl’s brother, Robert, said he wasn’t happy about the barn razing Monday because it has been in the family for so long, but he also realizes the decision was up to his brother.
The razing was prompted by insurance company concerns about the barn’s condition and attachment to the house.
Berl took lots of photographs for his family and his five siblings.
He and his wife, Sandy, eventually hope to have the old farmhouse razed as well, and build a new home.
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