- Gary Fletcher
- The Observer
FLORA Forty-year-old twins have gone to great lengths to rescue and restore an antique barn.
"The people here are great and have been kind," said Shirley Spiller of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. "A lot of them are helping."
"In my future, I see millions of gallons of primer," she added, laughing.
She can spend only one to two weeks per year working on their retirement project. Her brother, Ed, of Berkeley City, Calif., has more time to contribute. A police officer, he has two months off per year.
Ed has planted 2,000 trees on their property outside Flora on Redmond Grade.
Ed and his wife, Cindy, have children ages 7, 5 and 9 months.
Shirley is single and travels a lot as finance director of Yum Brands' Latin America division. Yum franchises include Taco Bell and Pizza Hut.
The twins grew up across the road from a big California dairy farm.
They attended the same high school that John Fogerty, leader of the '60s rock band Credence Clearwater Revival, did earlier.
For several years Fogerty performed at a Troy Days street dance. He still owns a vacation home there.
Ed went to school with the son of the CCR drummer, he said.
Growing up, Ed thought that by the time he retired he could have a ranch with a barn.
In recent years, when he began to pursue that dream, he found that ranches with barns were a rare and expensive commodity in California.
So he began exploring and scouting elsewhere.
Then a friend called him saying, "You can't believe this valley I ran across. There are barns everywhere. You can still get a ranch in Joseph, Oregon."
Ed flew up in 1993 to look at one, but it had sold.
Their father, Edward Spiller, bought a place on Promise Road outside Wallowa.
Ed kept watching, and he and Shirley bought the Flora ranch in 2000.
They came up each summer to work on the house and ranch.
Each year as Shirley passed a nearly century-old, 18-sided barn next to their ranch, it pained her to watch it decaying to the point that it was nearly ready to go. It had a big split in the roof.
She couldn't stand it anymore, so she contacted the owners and acquired the barn.
They found a barn moving company in Michigan. Those people came out a year ago to assess the barn.
These round-shaped barns were popular in the Great Lakes region because they will withstand high winds, the specialists told them.
There aren't many of them left, they said. They were aware of an 18-sided barn in St. John, Wash. There's an octagonal barn east of Joseph and a round barn outside Lostine.
Cables were run around the top and the bottom to hold it together. They were also placed diagonally inside to prevent swaying.
Hand excavation was done beneath the floor to place two main steel girders and 10 cross beams to prevent them from slipping.
This was backed up with chains. Sixty-thousand pounds of steel were under there, the mover said.
The girders were connected to eight-wheeled dollies.
By July 12 a truck was connected to the rigging for steering, and a D-7 Cat was in front of the truck.
There were several false starts in the experiment. The biggest was a loud bang announcing that the truck's frame had snapped.
Welding it back together delayed the move another day.
There were unexpected challenges the next day, too.
Finally, the barn was coaxed out of the hole and up a short incline.
The Cat then connected to the rear of the barn to ease it down the knob.
Then, on July 14, the barn was pulled up a half-mile hill and set to face Spiller's ranch house.
The next steps will be a 32-inch reinforced concrete stem wall foundation and a metal roof.
"North of $70,000," Shirley said when asked the project's cost.
And sure enough, traveling there, elk crossed in front of the car, spotted twin fawns went springing across the track and a fat badger approaching the road threw it in reverse to ricochet backward.
"We're lucky to be living in both worlds," Shirley said.
Photos by Hubert Murrill
