Many of these old barns are now abandoned and collapsing, but a few have been granted extended lives in third and fourth generation family farm and ranch operations. They are symbols of late-frontier settlement when hardy, self-reliant families, without benefit of mechanization, pioneered small-scale farms in the arid, high elevation valleys of the intermountain West, a rural culture now nearly extinct.

In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the self-sufficient farming community at Grovont once boasted 33 homesteads, a school, a church, and a post office. Barns near Grovont were nearly all linearly oriented along what was then the Jackson-Moran Road, prompting nearby residents to give the barns a moniker that stuck: Mormon Row.

Today, only five picturesque barns remain on the original Mormon Row homesteads. Their time and weather- worn timbers exhibit the skilled craftsmanship and remarkable structural integrity that has enabled them to endure fierce storms and heavy snow loading over decades.

Most Photographed Barn

When homesteader T. Alma Moulton began construction of a barn at Grovont in 1913, it is said he barely had money for nails. But nails or not, Alma knew he wouldn't make it through the unforgiving winters without a barn.

Alma and his sons added onto their barn as they could through the years, finally completing it 26 years later, in 1939. Today, the Moulton barn, burnished by sun and ice-blasting storms, and with the ramparts of the Teton Mountains towering dramatically in the background, has become an emblematic icon of Jackson Hole and the Old West and is one of the most photographed barns in the country.

Photographs of the Moulton barn have appeared on postcards, magazine covers, jigsaw puzzles, book jackets, road atlases, and travel guides. It has found its way onto credit cards, country music videos, worldwide websites, a telephone directory, wallpaper, and the Hollywood film Spencer's Mountain. Author Candy Moulton has characterized the public's captivation with Alma's barn scene as "a poor man's legacy."

Hand-Built and Pegged

The barns were constructed using only hand tools and native materials at hand. Alma's logs came from Timbered Island, a five-mile haul for a horse team that had to cross a major river.

The early barns of the intermountain West range from those with simple gable roofs to elaborate "prairie barns" with pronounced peak roofs projecting high above the hay loft opening and with attached lean-to roofs extending like wings near the ground. Built in the early 20th century era of horse farming, the barns sheltered animals below and stored the winter feed supply above.

Typically, the barns had an extension of the ridgepole, known as the hay hood, which supported a block and tackle system for hoisting loose hay up into the loft, usually through a large, bottom-hinged door.

Retired farmer Roy Chambers, who was born on Mormon Row along with his six siblings, claims hewed aspen or cottonwood were traditionally employed for stable flooring, because it was believed to be "softer wood and easier on the horses' feet."

On some of the larger, more elaborate barns, there may have been cupolas on the roofs for hot and moist air to escape from new hay. Barns were rarely painted because painting was expensive, and in some areas only served to raise property taxes.

It is now known that paint also trapped moisture and hastened rotting in some cases. In the cold dry climate, unpainted, weathered, and shrunken sheeting sometimes remains free of rot, even while the nails loosen or rust out.

Dale Breckenridge, a third generation Teton Valley farmer, says his father used to jokingly say, "Barn [sheeting] boards shrink an inch a decade."

On barns still in use, the original shake or board roofs have been replaced with galvanized metal. Roy Chambers recalls their father, in the 1950s, put a galvanized metal roof on their 1916 barn, the first one on Mormon Row to have a metal roof.

Beginning in the 1920s, and continuing into the 1950s and '60s, Grovont farmers and ranchers were "bought out" in the creation of Grand Teton National Park. Some farmers were content to be relieved from what was undeniably a hardscrabble life, and most were gone by the late 1950s, just as electricity was finally reaching them. A few, as Candy Moulton writes, "clung to the earth with all the tenacity they had shown when they built their homestead cabins."

Today the historic barns on Mormon Row are a part of Grand Teton National Park. They are being restored and maintained by the National Park Service and volunteers as part of a National Historic District.

On the western side of the Teton Mountains, a rail spur was constructed into Teton Valley in 1913. It carried farm crops and livestock to market. But on the east side of the mountains, Jackson Hole farmers faced a long and treacherous wagon haul across the mountains at Teton Pass to reach the railhead.

In the Teton Valley community of Alta, another time-worn barn looms on land adjoining that which has been developed for home sites. It recently sheltered dairy cattle. Frederick Duersh, with the help of his sons and carpenter John Christopherson, constructed this barn in 1934.

Alma Duersh, now up in years and one of the sons who participated in its construction, proudly recounts: "Its timbers were hauled by horse team from the mountains. The bents and rafters were raised by use of a homemade derrick. Green's Mill in Teton Canyon, located near Mill Creek, sawed the sheeting material, which was then hauled by horse and wagon to the site. The barn's imposing Douglas fir framework, pegged and without nails, remains rock solid to this day.

A huge old and leaning four-story barn can't help but attract the curiosity of all who pass by on the county road at what was once the community of Cache. Locals refer to it as the John Buxton barn.

Dick Egbert, at age 92, in a "Teton Valley Top To Bottom" ('98) magazine article, recounted how years ago, wagons needing repair could always find a blacksmith in the Buxton barn. A team of horses would pull a wagon right up the ramp and through the barn's big double doors. After repairs, the wagon could exit out the other end.

Nearby, a large, old barn with weathered gray sheeting was sagging until 2003 when a windstorm took it down. Dale Breckenridge called it the John Christopherson barn.

The Nahum Curtis barn near the town of Victor, in Teton Valley, is an imposing curiosity—exemplary of our disappearing rural legacy. The old barn is viewable from State Highway 33.

It stands abandoned and incongruent, amid private recreational home properties, adjacent to a newly constructed golf course.

Colossal relics of a bygone time, these great and beautiful barns were built by hard-working people who lived like they really believed that the tillage of the earth was the most important labor of man.