‘Barnstorming’: Mingo farm featured in statewide Iowa Barn Tour

MINGO — If there’s one memory Margaret Van Ginkel has about the barn she grew up with, it’s playing with kittens.

Van Ginkel and her family spent many days going into the loft of their barn in Mingo, not only to play with their farm cats but to jump down into a pile of hay.

“There was a hole where you had to climb up a ladder to get upstairs, then we’d jump down from it and land into the hay,” Van Ginkel said. “I’m surprised there wasn’t a hay fork in it. It seemed like every year I stepped on a nail and got a blister.”

That Hanson barn was one of 80 in the state of Iowa to be selected for the annual Iowa Barn Tour, organized and sponsored by the Iowa Foundation Barn Tour. As of Saturday morning, the tour attracted 10 guests to the Mingo barn. Typically, the barn attracts up to 150 guests, Van Ginkel said.

The tour allowed guests to look around inside the barn, at the antique tools once used inside the barn as well as read the instructions and historical notes attached to those tools.

Van Ginkel said this barn has been in the Hanson family for more than 150 years.

“We’re a heritage farm. The barn was originally made for working horses. They would keep the working horses in here and feed them,” Van Ginkel said. “As I was growing up, we had cattle in here, pigs where the cement was.”

Van Ginkel and her family discovered a lot about their history by researching this barn. Specifically, searching the barn every occasionally and finding items that belonged to past relatives.

“My grandfather was in the cattle business, and we found one of his business cars from the early 1900s,” Van Ginkel said. “He sold and bought cattle, which was a big thing for him.”

One other tidbit they uncovered about barn was it originally was two barns, one built in the 1890s while another one was built adjacent to it in 1904. Much of the interior foundation was built with parts of other barns that were torn down.

Today, the barn is only used to store a green 1969 pickup truck inside during the winter, as well as calves Van Ginkel’s nieces use to house before the Jasper County Fair.

The roof, at one point, was in danger of collapsing. As a result, Van Ginkel and her family went to the Iowa Barn Foundation for a $10,000 grant to help finance the roof repairs. The main condition for that grant money was to participate in the Iowa Barn Foundation’s annual barn tour event.

“It was either going to fall down, or we had to preserve it. So we had decided to preserve it,” Van Ginkel said. “It sure does help. It factored into whether or not we were going to keep the barn. We put a lot of work into it.”

Contact Orrin Shawl at 641-792-3121 ext. 6533 or at oshawl@newtondailynews.com