GREENTOWN, Ind. — The last round barn in Howard County was moved to the Greentown Lions fairgrounds this year, where it became part of the club’s pioneer village.

Crews from Trillium Dell Timberworks of Knoxville, Ill., dismantled the century-old structure; Lions Club members, many of them farmers with heavy workloads, completed the restoration under budget.

Standing tall and already booked for two wedding receptions next year, the barn had fallen into disrepair by the time Ronda Moyers, a great-granddaughter of its builder, donated it to the Lions Club. It will be called the Armfield-Moyers barn in honor of Lawrence Armfield – who built it on his southeastern Howard County farm in 1909 – and Moyers, who, more than anything, wanted the barn to once again be what it was.

Getting it back to the way Armfield built it proved to be beyond her reach. She was told in its current state the barn would be appraised for $110,000, but if she had it restored it would be worth $450,000. Others suggested she sell the barn for its lumber. She said no.

 “I wanted it to be someplace it could be seen and appreciated,” she said.

That’s a statement Armfield would have endorsed; all he wanted was something different. Having studied Purdue University’s findings about round barn superiority, he used stakes and binder twine to determine the size of barn he wanted – 60 feet in diameter. It would be built of lumber cut from his woods and have a cupola on top.

Over the years, he would discover design weaknesses: the cupola often twisted and collapsed, and the loft didn’t accommodate baled hay easily. Nevertheless, he liked the barn, even when one of his Belgian horses became perturbed while pulling the hay rope and started digging in the ground. The barn shook.

By the time the horse was quieted, it had pulled the rafters loose. That problem was corrected almost immediately, but by the time the Lions Club obtained the barn it needed attention in many areas.

 “The barn is being rebuilt stronger,” Lions member Denny Maple said during the reconstruction. “We’re putting in heavier floor joists and using 8-by-8 (foot) beams and pins in the tower frame.”

Original materials were reused as often as possible. “They may not be in the same spot,” Maple said, “but we salvaged what we could.” New boards were cut from the same woods that supplied lumber to Armfield in 1909.

 “Of all the work we did,” Maple said, “getting the compression rings installed proved to be most difficult.”

To do that, five or six boards were laminated to form the roof’s contour. Based on the experience of other round barn owners, they knew if one of those rings should fail, the structure eventually would collapse.

Fully reconstructed and pristine neat with metal roof and wood siding, the barn is, in Maple’s words, “as original as possible.”