The clock is ticking for Penfield officials to salvage what is left of a historic barn that stood on Clark Road near Shadow Pines park for nearly 150 years.
The barn collapsed Jan. 7 after years of neglect. Town officials hired a contractor to dismantle the one-story cart barn in June 2025 with hopes of saving parts of its timber frame for a future project, but the demolition was delayed several times. Now, those beams are encapsulated in snow and ice from an especially brisk winter.
As temperatures rise above freezing this week, public works director Bob Mohr said the barn is vulnerable to wood rot.
“The longer we wait, the worse it’s going to get,” he told town officials at a Jan. 28 board meeting. “Once (the snow) starts to melt, it just soaks right in.”
Penfield Town Supervisor Kevin Berry said town workers will tear down the barn in the next few weeks, once they can safely position construction equipment on the snow-covered site. The previously hired construction firm has released the town from its $50,000 contract. Rochester is expecting freezing rain and another wintry system later this week.
What happened to the Clark Road Barn in Penfield?
The urgency that has now fallen upon the Clark Road Barn follows an eight-year saga where it was mostly left untouched.
The late-19th century barn, once packed with cattle and grain, sits across from the historic 1832 Alpheus Clark House on a back road in Penfield. The town purchased the 212-acre parcel, including the house and a former golf course, in 2018. Both buildings were already in poor shape. The barn had notable water damage and rotting wood.
In 2019, town officials briefly tried to solicit ideas for how to best use the house and barn. Then, the twin structures sat empty for months.
The continued deterioration of both buildings struck a nerve in some residents, who considered it a missed opportunity to preserve a town heirloom or redevelop the property into a modern asset that retained its historic charm.
Town employees discovered the first floor of the Clark Road Barn had collapsed into the basement during a walk-through of the property in December 2022.
After a lengthy public input session in February 2023, the town tasked a committee of employees, elected officials and residents with deciding its fate. An 85-page report from a local structural engineering firm found the barn was mostly rotted through. Parts of the heavy-timber frame were in fair condition, but the roof, siding, windows, doors, floors and parts of the foundation had faltered.
“The barn, almost a century and a half old, has withstood the climate, a number of owners and differing uses in its lifetime,” engineers from Torchia Structural Engineering & Design wrote, calling the labor, time, material and expense needed to bring the barn back to life “quite substantial.”
If the town moved forward with repairs, the engineers said, the project would be considered a rehabilitation rather than a restoration because many of the original elements would need to be replaced.
And then there was the cost: an estimated $200,000 just to stabilize the structure while project plans were drawn up. Then, a full bill of repairs that rang in close to $1 million ― not including additional site improvements like paving, landscaping, new utilities or additional amenities to transform the barn into a community space.
Instead, town officials elected to move forward with a $50,000 selective demolition that would recover and store parts of the structure until they could decide how to best repurpose the beams. The town also approved a $6 million project to renovate the Clark House and build a new, attached lodge available for high-end rentals.
Clark Barn collapse: ‘I was gutted’
Katie Andres was part of an unsuccessful effort to advocate for the barn to be restored.
She said previous town officials did not acknowledge her offers to hire a veteran timber framer to provide another assessment on whether the structure could be saved. She was in the car pickup line outside of her son’s elementary school in January when she heard the barn had collapsed. They drove to Clark Road to see it for themselves.
“Walking around the barn’s jagged ruins, I was angry and heartbroken at the same time ― gutted actually,” she said in an email.
Berry said the state of the barn compelled him to run for town board in 2023. He was elected town supervisor last November.
“The way that the property had been allowed to languish was really concerning for me,” Berry said. “… I do think that it is very sad that the barn sat for so many years before progress was made on it ― and that’s why I at least want to see some good come out of the frame of the barn.”
The town does not yet have an estimate of how much of the barn is salvageable. Just two of the four walls are still standing, but Mohr said the way the barn fell leaves him hopeful many beams are intact.
Town officials plan to solicit the community’s input for how the beams should be repurposed. Berry said initial ideas include a covered structure for outdoor events like a farmer’s market or a mantle in the newly-renovated Clark House.
— Kayla Canne covers community safety for the Democrat and Chronicle with a focus on police accountability, government surveillance and how people are impacted by violence. Follow her on Instagram @bykaylacanne. Get in touch at kcanne@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Penfield races the thaw to save what’s left of a rare barn
Reporting by Kayla Canne, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle / Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
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