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A relatively modern addition to the historic Eli Whitney Museum collapsed Thursday night, the latest casualty of the winter’s record snowfall.
The only victim was a historic tractor, which can be repaired, according to Bill Brown, the museum’s director. The rest of the much older museum remained intact, and no one was hurt, he said.
The weight of this week’s ice and snow destroyed part of the museum’s historic barn. Brown said the segment that collapsed is not considered historically significant because it was modified in 1904. The main part of the barn, which dates to 1816, was unharmed.
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A stone wall, built at the same time as the barn, survived intact, he said. The barn is considered the oldest surviving example of a New England end gable barn, Brown said. The innovation was to put the doors at the end of the building, instead of on the sides, so that snow and rain wouldn’t impede the entrance.
Brown said the collapsed area will be repaired as soon as workers can get to it — no small feat, given the piles of frozen precipitation. The barn was already scheduled for renovations as part of a $150,000 project to spruce up the entire property, he said. Fixing the damaged area will cost “considerably less than that,” Brown said.
“This just proves that we really need to do the renovations we’re about to undertake,” Brown said.
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