Welcome to the Great Barn.
This massive barn, constructed during the summer of 1860, was possibly the largest agricultural structure in North Carolina on the eve of the Civil War.  Its great size and indicates the skill and capability of Paul Cameron's enslavement skilled tradesmen.  The structure was originally intended to house (between 70-80)mules, since they are more hardy docile, and require less feed than horses.  There are two significant ship building techniques used in the great barn.  First, the entire roof is held together by just 12 pegs in a technique called the queen's trusses.  Queens's trusses were generally used to build the hull (bottom) of a ship.  So the roof of this structure is basically a ship's hull, flipped upside-down!  The second technique is the "scarf joint".  Used when one beam ends and another begins, a zigzag pattern with a peg through the middle was used to elongate the beam.  One theory to these shipbuilding techniques is that the enslaved tradesmen who built the barn had possibly spent some time enslaved on the coast working in shipyards.