Valley man makes a living driving dump trucks and saving

historic buildings

By DANIEL SPOTH/Frontiersman reporter

PALMER -- Mark Loomis is a superhero of sorts.

By day, he works as the mild-mannered owner of Loomis Trucking, transporting gravel, snow, and the like around town in his dump truck.

However, when a call comes in saying that there's a barn or other historic building slated to be demolished, he throws off this modest mantle and springs into action. He and his partner, Doug Olson, load the threatened building on wheels, hitch it to the dump truck, and transport it to a safe place.

"It's kind of like an after-hours hobby for us," said Loomis. "We can't say no to free buildings, especially not the old ones."

Loomis has been saving historical buildings for over eight years now, but he has fostered a concern for historic Valley buildings since his father tore down a decaying Colony barn that had stood on his property for years. After rescuing a threatened barn across the street from his home, he became increasingly interested in saving structures around the Valley, and now hosts five barns and other historical buildings on his property in the Palmer Springer System. The Springer System contains many of the Valley's historic barns, and several local laws mandate that the barns cannot be transported out of this area.

Despite the fact that the barns and cabins are historic structures, the men must still bring them up to modern building codes, which often involve removing rotting timbers, reinforcing sagging floors, and patching up aging roofs. "We haven't been able to stick to the old historic covenants in all of the cases," Loomis stated, "but we've tried to set them up as close to the original as possible."

Fortunately, the construction job doesn't have to be immaculate. "Not everything is perfectly straight and level in a country barn," said Olson. "We want it to look like the original."

Loomis and Olson together are the patron saints of the Colony barn, a dwindling treasure in the Valley. Olson, who is a member of the Palmer Historical Society, states that the Valley originally had roughly 200 barns, mostly built during 1935 and 1936 as part of President Roosevelt's agricultural relocation plan.

Most of these barns were built with federal money portioned to the Valley for this program.

Olson estimates that perhaps 50 of these barns still exist, and of those 50 less than half are still in good condition. With Loomis' trucking and transportation skills and Olson's know-how in the areas of construction and building, the two are able to save many barns and other structures that would otherwise be demolished every year. "I've got the equipment to move the buildings and he's got the expertise," Loomis says of his partner.

Loomis is commonly alerted to the existence of threatened historical structures either by the owner of the property or the Historical Society itself.

Currently, Loomis and Olson are working on the McCormick barn, recently transported to a site near the intersection of Trunk Road and the Parks Highway.

The barn is joined with another nearby barn that the men rescued from Palmer Fishhook Road, and is slated to become an expansion of Country Treasures Antiques, which currently occupies the ground floor of the second barn.