Barn of the Year: ‘Evans Lake Pleasure Farm’ barn’s restoration honored
- Apr 2
- 10 min read
By DAVID PANIAN
FRANKLIN TWP. — Twenty-two years of restoration work were rewarded in March when a barn with an unusual name was selected as a Barn of the Year in Michigan.
What started as a roof repair project after Kristi and Kevin Cymes bought the Evans Lake Pleasure Farm barn and accompanying farmhouse led to a foundation repair project and other work all around the barn. Those projects continued through love, loss and love again.
Along the way, Kristi Cymes researched the barn’s history, trying to find out who built it and when as well as trace the property’s ownership.
Her efforts paid off in early March when Cymes’ Evans Lake Pleasure Farm was named the Barn of the Year in the Continuing Agriculture — Family category by the Michigan Barn Preservation Network. It qualified as a continuing agricultural use because Cymes still uses it for hay storage as well as for her three goats, minipig and chickens. Until recently, she also had up to three horses.
Winning the award was something she thought about when she first read about the MBPN’s Barn of the Year awards in the Michigan Farm Bureau’s newsletter.
“I’m like, ‘What is this Barn of the Year thing? I’m going to get Barn of the Year,’” she recalled during an interview Monday in the house she and Kevin built in 2020 on the site of the original farmhouse before he died of prostate cancer in 2021.
The house and barn are on Tripp Road, just up the hill from Breyman Highway along the eastern shore of Evans Lake. Many of the parcels where lakefront cottages now stand once were part of the larger farm property. Those lots were sold well before the Cymeses or Kevin’s father or previous owners Wayne and Mildred Balliet owned the property.
Cymes’ historical research has been almost as involved as the work to restore the barn. She’s spent a lot of time in Adrian at the Lenawee County Registrar of Deeds Office, the Lenawee County Historical Museum and the Adrian District Library going through plat maps, census data and digitized editions of The Daily Telegram, looking for references to the past owners and the summertime resort that became known as the Evans Lake Pleasure Farm. She’s hoping to learn more once the Tecumseh Area Historical Museum reopens from its winter break.
She has a bit more time to do the research after retiring last July from Clinton Community Schools, where she was the school nurse. She still picks up shifts on a contingency basis in the neonatal intensive care unit at Trinity Health Ann Arbor, formerly St. Joseph Mercy Hospital, where she has worked since 1988. She’s worked exclusively in the NICU since 2012.
The award was formally presented at the Michigan Barn Preservation Network’s annual meeting March 14 in St. Johns. Other barns and their owners were honored in the Adaptive Use — Family/Private, Adaptive Use — Commercial and Non-Profit Adaptive Use categories. Three other barns were recognized as “Great Michigan Barns” for the restoration efforts by their owners.
Saving the structure
Cymes’ project wasn’t specifically about restoration. It was first about making the barn usable after she and Kevin bought it and the original farmhouse in 2002 from Kevin’s father, Richard Cymes. It had gaping holes in the roof that needed to be fixed, weeds were growing through it, and the doors were falling off. There wasn’t much money to make the repairs, but when one of the beams in the barn became rotten from the rainwater coming through the roof, they had to do something. So in 2013 they put together the money and hired Mike Hall to fix the roof. They didn’t return it to the original shake single roof, opting instead for asphalt shingles. A lot of the roof at the time of the repairs was metal.
Before they could do the roof, though, they had to shore up the crumbling fieldstone foundation so that it could support the weight of the new roof. They hired Kenny Tildon to fix the foundation, which he did by jacking up the barn and resetting the stones with fresh mortar. Cymes said she didn’t want to replace the foundation with newer materials. She was very familiar with the barn from keeping her horses there when she grew up across the lake, so she had an idea of how it should look.
“One of the things that I really wanted is for it to be as original as I found it, or as I thought it should be,” she said.
Tildon also put in a concrete floor to help stabilize the foundation.
When it came time to redo the barn’s siding, she didn’t want metal.
“I personally just wanted the wood siding, because I like the wood look inside,” she said. She also intended to paint the exterior a traditional shade of red.
Replacing the siding became a priority because the boards would flap around during each wind storm. By then, Cymes had started dating Pete Astfalk, who knew a builder with a passion for barns, David Borntrager, who could replace the rotting beams and siding. Borntrager used wood recovered from other barns on Cymes’ barn, securing the siding with screws instead of nails to make sure everything stayed in place.
Not all of the old siding was replaced. At some point in time, a past owner must have been desperate to make a repair because what is obviously an old ironing board with its one tapered end was used to patch an opening on the barn’s west end. It’s still there.
Before they could paint it, they had to do something with the small addition, which was basically a garage, that had been put on the north side of the barn, facing Tripp Road. Not only was it falling down and endangering the main barn, but it partially blocked the “Evans Lake Pleasure Farm, Wm. Mitchell 1909” lettering on that side of the barn.
They ended up tearing down the addition and hiring Victory Construction in March 2024 to build something similar that is a little shorter and wider so “Evans Lake Pleasure Farm” and “1909” can be seen more clearly.
Then it was time to paint. They hired Bill Gaul, a painter with a passion for barns, in May 2024 and supplied him with 23 gallons of Mad Dog primer, 7 gallons of white paint and 60 gallons of Benjamin Moore “Country Red” paint, which is a deeper red than the pole barn out behind the barn and house. Cymes said the pole barn’s red has too much orange in it, so she wanted to make sure she chose a true red for the barn.
Once Gaul was done, on May 25, 2024, Cymes climbed up on the new addition to repaint the “Evans Lake Pleasure Farm” and “1909” in white letters with a black drop shadow to make the lettering pop a little. Part of the “Wm. Mitchell” lettering is still visible inside the new addition, which is where Astfalk parks his pickup.
There are still many original parts of the barn, including the main beams. Some are even hand-hewn and secured with mortise and tenon joinery. Cymes also notes that the beams on one end show the telltale marks of a circular saw, indicating that those were made later. The main part of the barn is 60 feet long by 30 feet wide. The addition is 16 x 24.
The original farmhouse did not have the “good bones” that the barn had, so it was torn down and replaced with the current home. However, parts of the original house were saved and used within the barn and the new house.
Future plans include repurposing the metal roof and leftover siding to finish off the interior of the addition, securing the loft flooring to make better use of that area, installing a railing on the stairs to the loft for safety, returning the lightning rods to the roof, possibly installing eaves and gutters and continuing research on the barn’s history.
Tracing the past
But what is it with the name, Evans Lake Pleasure Farm? Well, the barn was built about 150 years ago on 120-some acres of farmland on the eastern shore of Evans Lake, just south of what back then was the Sauk Trail. That old, Native American route across southern Michigan is now U.S. 12. It eventually was promoted as a resort with outdoor activities by owners in the early 1900s.
In the parlance of the early 20th century, “pleasure” outings included recreational activities like boating, fishing and wading in the cool waters of a lake or stream.
The land appears to have been first been granted by the U.S. government to Henry W. Sisson of New York in 1835. He built a tavern nearby in 1834, then sold it to John Davenport in 1839. Davenport also owned the land where Cymes’ barn and home are now. By 1864, the county’s plat map, which shows who owns which parcels of property, showed the parcel along the lake now had two structures and was owned by Joseph W. Stitt. She assumes the house was built by Stitt sometime around 1864 and certainly before 1875 because a nearly intact edition of The Tecumseh Herald from 1875 with the name J.W. Stitt written on it was found inside a wall of the old farmhouse. There also is a 2-foot by 10-foot sign being used as a floorboard in the barn’s loft that has Stitt’s name on it advertising doors for sale.
Stitt died in April 1909. In October 1908, his son-in-law, Albert Aylesworth, placed an ad in the Telegram to sell the property. The ad promoted the land as “choice level land, good buildings, well fenced, good lake frontage, fine cottage lots and splendid opportunity for summer resort. Will be sold cheap to close real estate if taken soon.”
Willard Mitchell and his second wife, Mary, bought the land in February 1909 for $5,500.
“By this time the Irish Hills area was starting to become a popular tourist destination for many to enjoy the beautiful rolling hills and freshwater lakes,” Cymes wrote in her award application to the MBPN. “Stores and lake resorts were popping up all around the numerous lakes in this area. I believe Willard Mitchell used this farm as an opportunity to cash in on the entrepreneurship of this increasingly admired area.”
Cymes found a newspaper ad Mitchell placed in June 1909 promoting the “old Stitt landing” on Evans Lake as a place for outings. She’s also found photo postcards from 1909 with photos showing views she recognizes as from the waterfront near her home that identified it as Mitchell Landing at Evans Lake, though sometimes misspelling Mitchell or Evans.
It was likely that spring or summer when the name “Evans Lake Pleasure Farm,” the year “1909” and the letters “Wm. Mitchell” were painted on the barn. Cymes doesn’t know why it had “Wm.,” which is a common abbreviation of “William,” when Mr. Mitchell’s name was Willard.
The Mitchells didn’t run the farm for long. Willard Mitchell died in 1912, and Mary decided to quit farming and placed an ad for an auction of the farm’s livestock, machinery and other items. Notably, the land itself was not listed as part of the auction.
In March 1913, the Telegram had a short item that reported John Thielan and his family were moving to the Mitchell farm. Cymes found a postcard that listed Thielan as the proprietor, and she found an ad inviting guests to the Evans Lake Pleasure Farm where guests could find “good fishing, new boats, board by the day or week, rates reasonable.”
Mary Mitchell married David F. Rockwell in 1915. He was a businessman in the Lenawee Junction and Palmyra area, selling groceries, hardware and gasoline, and he became the proprietor of the resort, according to postcards and ads Cymes found. One ad in 1918 listed the 120 acres of land available for rent because the present tenant was liable for the military draft as World War I was being fought. Cymes believes this was Rockwell’s son, Lester, who, according to news reports, was drafted and served with the U.S. Army in Europe where he was wounded.
There would be occasional ads for auctions of farm equipment and livestock at the farm, but it didn’t change hands again until 1926 when Martha Wilson bought it from Mary Mitchell and David Rockwell. Cymes found the original title abstract listing the chronological ownership of the property that was done when Wilson purchased it for $5,000.
Cymes was unaware of Wilson’s ownership until one day last May when a man with his grandson drove up and stopped to admire the barn. Astfalk, who had since moved in with Cymes, was on the tractor in the driveway by the road and noticed them looking at the barn and spoke to the man who said his grandfather owned the farm at one time and wanted to talk to Astfalk about it.
“I’m not the one to talk to,” Astfalk told him. “There’s a lady back there cleaning her barn yard out that would love to talk to you.”
“And needless to say, we didn’t get anything more done that day,” Astfalk said Monday. “Kristi ended up talking to that guy until the sun went down.”
Cymes was a bit confused about what the man, Ron Monroe, was telling him about his grandmother, Martha Wilson. She knew a Martha Hopponen and her husband, Walter, had owned the farm from about 1953-67 and she brought out the title abstract she had that listed the owners up until 1926.
“So I dug through this, and I’m like, ‘You know, there’s all kinds of names in here, and it goes way back.’ I’m like, ‘Your grandma’s name’s not in here, right?’” Cymes recalled.
After Monroe left, Cymes pulled down the upper, left corner of the cover sheet of the stapled packet of pages that had folded over.
“I pulled this little corner down, and I’m like, ‘Well, I’ll be darned,’” she said. “I’ve never actually read it. It says plain and simple, ‘For Mrs. Martha Wilson.’ This was written for his grandmother.”
That discovery led Cymes to backtrack as far as she could to verify the first owner, which was Sisson.
Cymes said she’s planning to get together again with Monroe. She’s hoping that he has some photos showing the barn and the original farmhouse from when his grandmother owned the property.
Wilson appears to have owned the farm until her death in 1951. However, the county’s 1940 plat map shows the owner as Union Central Life Insurance, which was a company that specialized in managing foreclosed farm mortgages. Cymes suspects that Wilson ran into financial difficulties during the Great Depression, because some of the waterfront parcels were sold off around then, too.
When the Hopponens owned the farm, it was 92.62 acres. Wayne and Mildred Balliet owned about 74 acres from 1971-94 before selling to Richard Cymes in 1994.
Along with finding information about the farm, Cymes also learned about the past owners’ lives and families.
“I really feel I got to know these people,” she said.
Now, she’s hoping to pinpoint the year, if not the exact date, when the barn was built. Cymes said she would love to find a notice in one of the newspapers about a barn-raising on the property.
Comments