FARMINGTON – Edith McCleery watched with apprehension as an excavator clawed at the sides of her Wilton Road barn Thursday.

“I can’t stand to stay out there and watch the men work,” McCleery said. “Yet, I can’t stay away. I just keep praying for the safety of the two men working on it.”

The McCleery farm, with long, rolling fields and a large, extended barn, has long been a familiar site to travelers on Routes 2 and 4.

A couple of men from K&M Demolition of Livermore changed that view Thursday morning as they tore down the newer portion of the barn. The debris will be burned, possibly on Friday or Saturday, McCleery said.

“It was a hard decision, but I wanted to take it down rather than have it just fall in,” she said. McCleery expected the heavy snowfall last winter to cave in the roof of the empty barn.

Built in 1967, the barn addition housed chickens until an accident ended that business.

“We went out of the broiler business in a hurry,” she said, explaining that a grain deliverer wasn’t watching his gauges closely enough and dumped about 10 tons of grain into a silo. The grain silo is the small, square structure on top of the roof.

As the excess grain built up and spilled onto the fourth-floor ceiling, it collapsed from the weight, crashing down to the third and second floors before landing in the basement.

“A lot of chickens were gone, but fortunately a farm worker had just finished feeding the chickens in the basement and had moved into the basement of the older section. He could have easily lost his life,” McCleery said. “We went running when we heard it.”

She and her husband, Robert McCleery (who died in 2002), did not rebuild the inside of the structure after the accident in the early 1980s and have since only used it for hay and light storage.

Some of the grain remained on the roof and had eaten small holes over the years, Edith McCleery said. The roof was like a sieve, which heightened her fear of a cave-in.

The workers were finding that the barn was more solid than the family thought, she said. “We supposed it was unsafe, but they’re finding it was built sturdy … but it needed to come down.”

Working with an excavator, the demolition crew had hoped to simply pull down the barn and burn it, but the building was coming down in pieces as the men climbed into the rafters to hook chains in several places.

“It creaks and cracks as they work,” McCleery said. “I don’t think they’ll be able to burn today; maybe tomorrow,” she said.