Star-Journbal Editor
The majestic old barn at Pleasant Hill Farm was on fire Monday evening, and the flames were visible for miles.
Firefighters from Hillsboro and Marion rushed six trucks to the scene at 1657 Kanza Road. But finding an inferno, they could only watch as the landmark burned to the ground.
Instead, they turned their hoses on the nearby farm home of Brad and Jean Wiens and their three children, to keep it from burning.
Sweltering in heavy coats, the firefighters may have drunk more water than they put on the barn.
"It was fully involved when we showed up on the scene [at about 9 p.m.]," said Hillsboro assistant fire chief Todd Helmer.
"And there's really not a lot you can do with a building that's fully involved except a defensive fight."
In the end, there was no one injured, no livestock killed, and no farm equipment burned, but a monument of Mennonite culture was gone.
"It was no big monetary loss, just a big sentimental loss," said Brad Wiens, as he watched his barn burn. "There was big time history to it."
Neighbors came from miles around Monday night. One of them was Virgil Litke, a gray-haired historian who grew up attending the nearby Ebenfeld Mennonite Brethren Church.
"When I was a little boy, our pastor lived here," Litke said.
J.K. Hiebert, one of the founding lay pastors of the Ebenfeld Mennonite Brethren Church, built the barn in 1912. He was a breeder of registered Holstein cattle. Litke speculated that members of the church built the barn for Hiebert.
Flames were already leaping from the eaves of the two-story barn when Sheldon Wiens, 12, smelled smoke and looked outside. His older sister, Natalie, 16, dialed 911. Brooklyn, 7, also was home at the time.
Brad had run an errand and was on his way back home when he saw the smoke. Jean was at an ecommerce meeting at the Pizza Hut in Hillsboro, when she saw the fire trucks go by.
Mother's intuition told her they were going to their farm.
"I was sitting there and I knew the kids were at home," she said. "I wanted to ask someone to borrow their cell phone, but I didn't." Instead, Jean jumped in her car and followed the smoke, praying it was the barn and not the house.
The barn, located about 150 feet north of the house, was totally ablaze, but the gentle southerly breeze kept a disappointing loss from becoming a tragedy.
"It was very good news that the wind wasn't coming from the north," Helmer said.
While grateful that his family was unharmed, Wiens was shaken by the loss of a part of history he had vowed to protect.
"It was a picturesque barn, and I put some red tin on it to kind of preserve it," Wiens said. "A lot of farmers take down barns nowadays, but people would say, 'Don't ever take that barn down, it looks so pretty' so I made an extra attempt to make it nice.
Ironically, the tin siding made the barn impossible to save, Helmer said.
"The building was completely covered with tin and was on top of everything that burned, like a tin oven," said, adding that the tin, in addition to making it a very hot fire, also made it impossible to get water on the fire.
Nearly an hour into the fire, two kittens ran from under the hot tin roof. One was scooped up by a firefighter, who gave it to little Brooklyn, who held it tightly.
"They were stuck under there," she said. "They were stray. They didn't have names."
In the process of preserving the empty barn, Brad had put a porch on it and was cleaning it up again.
Now all that's left are the numbers "1912" which Jean had removed to restore them.
"This," she said, "was a very special barn."
