Once a Cable Guy's barn, now an artifact

Four years ago, he got his wish -- and then some.

Emmett Gyhra, who farms the land where Dan Whitney -- better known as Larry the Cable Guy -- used to live, gave the old Whitney family barn to the museum.

Whitney was born in Pawnee City in 1963, and his family lived in a house near the barn at 14th and I streets before they moved to Florida in the 1970s.

With the help of Ensor Movers of Johnson, the museum moved the barn to its grounds four years ago. The 25-ton barn likely was built in the late 1800s, and moving it was no easy task. Shingles fell, and weathered siding had gaping holes.

"They pretty well tore up the inside when they moved it," said Mullin, the museum's president.

The Ensor family moved the barn for about $4,000, one-third of the usual fee, and a plaque inside the front entrance honors owner Darrell Ensor, who was killed in a plane crash a few weeks before he planned to move the barn with an old steam engine. The family finished what he began.

The museum wasted no time in restoring the hip-roof style barn and hired a crew of local Amish workers to replace missing wood siding.

"They showed up on March 31 during a terrible storm," said Yvonne Dalluge, treasurer and longtime museum volunteer. "They had one side already done."

In about a week, the crew cut more than 300 siding slats made of poplar.

Then, the museum hired a company to put on a new gray-shingle roof.

"The last time it was roofed, Larry the Cable Guy helped put it on," said Mullin, who used to mow around the barn when he was a teenager and restored most of its interior in his spare time during the past several years.

Area residents Brian and Michelle Rapp painted the barn its original red and white.

Mullin, 55, expected restoration to take as long as 15 years.

Museum treasurer Dalluge, 76, had other ideas.

"I'm not one to let things go," she said. "I'm a pusher. I wanted it done. I did not want it to detract from the other buildings."

The barn is one of the first things visitors see when they approach the museum on the east edge of town just off Nebraska 8 and Nebraska 50.

Since it opened in 1968, the museum has become a repository of historic buildings, vintage vehicles and farm equipment, tools, quilts, antiques and 800 different types of barbed wire -- all from Pawnee County.

Twenty-one buildings -- including five one-room country school houses; an 1857 log cabin; the home of Nebraska's first governor, David Butler; and the U.S. Sen. Kenneth Wherry Memorial Library -- on seven acres house most of the museum's collection. 

The Whitney barn isn't just sitting pretty. It's been home to a barn dance, and school kids have toured the inside, which includes a tire swing in the hay loft.

Right now, the barn holds a 1919 International Titan and a 1922 Case tractor, both in good working condition. Eventually, museum officials want to move in some livestock and demonstrate how loose hay was put into the hayloft using a rope and pulley system.

Mullin and Dalluge estimate the museum has spent at least $40,000 on restoring the barn, with most of the money coming from private donations.

"It's the history of the county," Mullin said, noting that old barns are an endangered species all over the United States.

To their knowledge, Whitney has not visited the restored barn.

"I know he knows about it," Dalluge said, adding that people have said they've seen him drive by.