The best barns are horse barns...

We're thinking of another visit to one of our favorite towns in SE Washington, Walla Walla. It's home to a thriving wine industry, is on the edge of the Palouse wheat country, and has some of my favorite houses and barns. It also has hundreds of geocaches, if you're into that (like DW and I are). There are twisty back roads for the sports car, mountains and rushing rivers, snow in the winter and heat in the summer. It's one of our favorite places.

A few years ago we discovered the Kibler barns, a barn unlike any I'd ever seen. So when we got home, I did a bit of research.



The Kibler family left an enduring legacy in the Walla Walla Valley, through the agricultural structures they built. Four barns were built from similar plans, each constructed for members of the extended family, and two of the Kibler Barns remain in the family to this day. The white barn on the original farmstead, built in 1918, was accepted in the first round of nominations to the Washington Heritage Barn register (along with my brother-in-law's family barn on Vashon Island).





As much as I love barns, I also love farmhouses. It's great that this wonderful farm has an equally wonderful farmhouse.



My favorite of the four Kibler barns is across the green wheat fields from the 1870 Kibler Farm. It's the biggest of the Kibler barns, painted red with white trim, and was built to stable 48 draft horses. Can't you just imagine this barn full of huge horses at the end of the day? The grooms rubbing each horse down after the day's work, tossing hay down from the loft into each manger, bedding each stall with fresh straw, the horses munching their evening hay.



Some might disagree, but I think the best barns are horse barns.

Linking up today with Tom's Barn Collective.