Hallelujah. Job complete. Finally.

Just the sight of it, as I approach the driveway leading to my carriage-shed stall, has lowered my anxiety-elevated blood pressure 10 points.

I’m talking about our 19th-century Old Tavern Farm cupola, long a vexing concern for me. For more than 10 years I had tried unsuccessfully to get it roofed. Yeah, yeah, there was lots of talk, and soft commitments. But no follow-through until recently, when a roofing company from faraway Barre, Vermont finally stepped to the plate and completed a first-class job last week.

My sincerest thanks to Roofing Vermont for metal-roofing and painting a cupola worth saving, and for removing a high-priority home-improvement project from my checklist.

As stewards of an historic upper Greenfield Meadows home, my wife and I did not want to be associated with our dignified cupola’s demise. A stylish example, I’m sure the neighborhood would have objected if we just let it rot and tumble to oblivion as so many seem to be doing these days. Now it’s preserved until it becomes someone else’s headache, long after my last card has been played. The roof keeping it high and dry is rated for at least 50 years, which is a comforting, maybe even euphoric, thought for this 72-year-old man. My cupola worries are over.

Any observer who regularly travels rural New England roads must realize that old barns and their crowning cupolas – some sporting leaning copper weathervanes with Verde patinas – are in varying sad states of preservation. In recent years I’ve pointed out many crumbling examples in my travels, always accompanied by the sympathetic disclaimer that I understand why they’ve fallen into disrepair.

Problem is, it’s next to impossible to find someone willing to roof one for a reasonable fee, if at all.

It’s become a modern-day cycle for old family farms. First, the folks living in them stop farming. Then their outbuildings disintegrate and collapse as the dwellings start showing signs of neglect. It’s a sad state of affairs from a historic-preservation perspective. These proud monuments to an old way of life seem to be evaporating from the landscape faster than a Fourth of July puddle.

Why? Because today’s families go to the store for meat, eggs, fruit, vegetables and dairy products, which they don’t even associate with farms, and old folks on fixed retirement incomes can’t afford to keep up old properties, including the cupola-ed barns that give the local landscape character. And, frankly, even middle-class working families residing on old farms are up against it when trying to maintain their properties.

Stately cupolas seem to be the first architectural elements things to go. They started to appear on new and improved local barns in the mid-19th century, when families were expanding their farming operations. During the post-Civil War era of the mid-1860s and 1870s they really started to multiply.

Because postwar barns were constructed of lumber from improved sawmills, the structures were more airtight than earlier, looser, draftier barns. Thus, they needed better venting systems to remove moisture from their hot, humid interiors, where hay cured and livestock emitted noxious fumes. A louvered cupola created a chimney effect, pulling out moisture to minimize mold and mildew, and help prevent spontaneous-combustion hayloft fires.

Different designs of cupolas and their weathervanes became marks of status and distinction personalizing family farms. Attractive cupolas drew the eyes of travelers upward during the slower horse-and-carriage days; they, thus became the focal points of roadside farm profiles.

Family tradition ties my cupola to the Lincoln assassination of April 15, 1865. I was told by descendants of previous owner Elijah Worthington Smith (1830-1901) that carpenters adding the front section of my 70-foot barn and joining it to the house with carriage sheds learned of Honest Abe’s murder from passersby. The cupola displays a traditional, simple, early Victorian style, which likely came down to the personal taste of either the builder, the owner, or both.

I personally prefer the simple elegance of early-Victorian template over the more ornate later styles, some with windows instead of shutter-like louvers. But that’s just me. I’m sure others prefer the asymmetrical later look.

E.W. Smith bought my property in 1858, when its days as a stagecoach tavern were in peril due to the railroad’s arrival. His 1865 expansion doubled the length of the barn, while extending the rear east wall some 16 feet for a saltbox section to house a few dairy cows. The new front addition contained horse stables topped by a haymow, along with a scale house to weigh cartloads of apples and other products being transported by wagon to the freight yard.

The front section was then connected to the house with a three-bent carriage shed that kept buggies, carriages and family members walking from house to barn out of the weather.

The expansion also brought in the cupola, and the name “Old Tavern Farm” painted across the new carriage sheds. The painter was likely famed Greenfield house/sign/furniture painter and folk artist George Washington Mark, who had previously grain-painted the tavern’s interior doors and feather-painted the wide pine floors.

Although I can only speculate about Mark’s creation of the name Old Tavern Farm across my carriage sheds, I can positively identify the last man to carefully repaint it. That would be the late John McAulay, an interesting man in his own right, who, over the five-year period between 2004 and 2008 – living in his Chevy van with an interior decorated as a ship-captain’s quarters – hand-scraped every inch of my home and outbuildings, then hand-painted it three times with a brush.

Less than a year after he was finished, in July of 2009, my wayward friend John was dead, stricken by a fatal heart attack at the laundromat on the west end of Main Street in Greenfield.

Though John didn’t list roofing as one of his many skills, I’m sure he would have found a way to paint my cupola had I asked – and, I might add, paint it right. Sadly, he never got the chance. Here today, gone tomorrow, John was a good man, a great painter/handyman and an interesting New England character worth studying.

What’s interesting is that the painters McAulay and Mark came from the same neighborhood on opposite sides of the Connecticut River – McAulay from Springfield, Vermont and G.W. Mark from Charlestown, New Hampshire.

Coincidence?

I doubt it.