Show barn at Lenawee County Fair upgraded with Tecumseh family’s leadership

ADRIAN — Visitors to the Lenawee County Fair this year saw the results of a renovation project that was about 15 years in the making.

The 4-H show barn, where the many animal auctions take place, was transformed from an aging facility with a dirt floor and a dark interior to a modern structure with a concrete floor, more seating for buyers, improved ventilation, and better lighting and acoustics. Members of a Tecumseh-area family led the renovation effort.

Fundraising for the project began about 15 years ago, said Chris Downard, who chaired the renovation committee. His sons Ben and Bryce also were on the committee. Chris and Ben are beef barn superintendents, and Bryce is a dairy barn superintendent.

“We’ve been involved with it since it started raising money,” Chris said. “…And it was time to do it.”

Not only did the structure need to be repaired, but the fundraising had gone on long enough.

“It needed to happen,” Ben said, “because people were starting to wonder, where’d our money really go to?”

“Since we broke ground, this family has spent thousands of hours out here doing the labor and the work as well as making connections with people in the community,” said Janelle Stewart, the Michigan State University Extension educator who oversees the Lenawee County 4-H program.

Ben is a foreman at Iron Creek Construction of Tecumseh, which donated equipment and materials and saved 4-H a lot of money on the project, Stewart said.

“We wouldn’t have been able to do what we did in here without them 100% donating every piece of equipment we needed,” Stewart said during an interview in the barn.

“We’re not a unique family,” Chris said. “Most 4-H families are the same way. There’s a lot of families here that put their heart and soul into 4-H. … We’re just lucky enough to have the means to do what we do.”

Connections come through
Through Chris’ career as a carpenter, Ben’s work at Iron Creek, Bryce’s work at Bowling Transportation in Ohio, and the connections their family has made through being in 4-H for four generations, they found lots of individuals and businesses that were willing to help out.

“The community support has been awesome,” Ben said.

“It’s not about a building,” Chris said. “It’s about the kids and what 4-H does for them.”

“I would hire 4-H kids above any other kids because their work ethic is so much greater than most kids,” Ben said.

Businesses would donate materials and equipment or greatly reduce the cost.

“We have our donation boards up in here, but a lot of them don’t want to be recognized,” Ben said. “We got our concrete at cost. And they probably put it in at their cost.”

Ben knows people who work at Wolverine Rental in Ann Arbor, which has a relationship with 4-H in Washtenaw County. They helped out when Ben asked.

“They gave us a lift to use in here for six months at half cost,” Ben said.

Individuals stepped up, too, like the engineer they know from church who advised on the project. Chris and Ben were both familiar with working with concrete at their jobs, but they went to experts in concrete work to find out just what they should do.

The monetary donations for the renovations added up to about $180,000, Chris said. The Wayne Roback Memorial Fund collected about $3,000, which was put into a patio outside the back entrance to the barn. Chris figures there was another $200,000 worth of donated labor, materials and services that went into the barn.

Planning the project
At about 70 years old, the barn had good bones but needed work. Chris had a vision of what the end result would look like.

“It’s been two years of thinking before we started on the project,” Ben said.

At the renovation committee’s first meeting, they started a list on a whiteboard of what things they could do. At the next meeting, they narrowed that list down and added some things. That process continued for about three or four months.

“It wasn’t willy nilly,” Ben said. “Everything was thought through.”

Some of the repair work was obvious, like replacing the rotted wooden siding.

“We took siding off the bottom, we put steel on, we put the lean-to on the outside for storage.” Chris said. “We put steel on the outside, gutters and everything, and then on the inside we put concrete floors, steel walls, acoustic steel.”

The acoustic steel was a key improvement to help people attending the auctions hear what is happening. The steel sheets have many holes punched in them to help absorb sound to cut down on echo and reverberation, and the ceiling is designed with the metal at specific angles to better distribute the sound waves.

Another benefit of the new interior metal is the color. It’s white, which, combined with the new, brighter lighting, really changes the atmosphere inside the barn so that it’s a lot easier to see what’s going on.

More trusses were added to the roof to support the steel, Ben said. That was one of the things their engineer friend recommended.

The barn has all new doors, a new balcony where staff can keep track of the sales, and a catwalk to provide better access to electrical components.

The amount of bleacher seating was reduced — the bleachers are rarely full during the sales — in order to provide more seating on the sales floor, which often is full. Now, there is space for about 200 padded chairs on the floor, which doubled the amount of seating. The chairs were donated by a local church.

There is new concrete around the outside, too, and the exterior was regraded. Both of those improvements keep rainwater from running through the barn, which was a problem before.

Preserving history
There are references to the barn’s history. The poles that hold up the barn are original to when it was built in the 1950s. The patio is dedicated to Wayne Roback, who died Dec. 10, 2024. Roback was a longtime fair board member, a 4-H alumnus who as an adult became a 4-H leader, junior livestock board member and swine superintendent.

“There’s picnic tables out there for the kids and people, and they’ve used those so much,” Ben said.

Over between the sales box and the doorway that faces the sheep barn, they hung a door made from the barn’s original wood siding and hung on the original track and hardware. A plaque is affixed to the door. It gives a brief history of the barn and the renovation project. It also explains that behind the door and under the stairs to the balcony is a time capsule that will be opened in 2050. New items will be added to it, then it will be resealed to be reopened in 2075. The process will repeat every 25 years.

They wanted to do a time capsule, Chris said, because there isn’t a good history of when the show barn was built. They know it was built in the late 1950s, but the details are sketchy. For example, there are stories that the telephone company installed the barn’s poles, but others say farmers did it. Roback was a kid then and remembered the telephone company doing the work at both the beef barn and the show barn, Chris said.

“That’s why we want to do the time capsule, to try to report history,” Chris said.

“We asked all 4-H families to get with their grandparents and their parents and look up old pictures and write on the back of them what they are,” Chris said. “We’ve got hundreds of pictures so far. We’re going to put sale bills and maybe some trophies in there from the times.”

After all the work, there was a ribbon-cutting ceremony on the Saturday before the fair, then they got to see the upgraded barn in use for the first time with the rabbit sale.

“It was gratifying,” Chris said. “It really makes you feel good to see people enjoy it.”