Other Voices

Timothy Rau, mallet in hand, stands in front of the post-and-beam barn he built for his wedding. He learned how to make mortise-and-tenon joints from his grandfather, the late Everett Rau, to create a timber frame for a sign that announces the name of their Guilderland farm. He’s hardly stopped since, and now owns the New World Barn Company, which both restores ancient structures and builds new ones in traditional ways. He says in this week’s podcast, that he was inspired by the words of John Ruskin, the Victorian English art critic and philosopher: “When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance of them, ‘See! This our fathers did for us.’” Rau is saddened that the 1833 house that Altamont’s first doctor, Frederick Crounse, lived in and practiced from is to be demolished. The town of Guilderland and the village of Altamont together purchased it for $40,000 in back taxes in 2006 and then let it languish. The municipalities have each set aside $50,000 to demolish it. Rau would like to work with the demolition crew to save at least the post-and-beam frame with the idea it could be rebuilt elsewhere, perhaps at the Altamont fairgrounds where the public could appreciate it and learn from it. "There's nothing more honest than a timber frame," he says. "Everything is there for you to see — the marvel and the awe."