Born as utilitarian farm structures to shelter livestock, cure tobacco and store hay grain and machinery barns have matured into coveted residential architecture. Classified stylistically as German, Dutch or English, they comprise innumerable shapes and have elaborate, timbered, post and beam framed internal spaces. As suburbs and edge cities engulfed farming areas and second recreational homes for urban residents proliferated, a passionate effort to preserve, restore and convert barns emerged. Barns, and their cousins, covered bridges, typify a romanticized nostalgia, partially nurtured by folklore, for the more civil values of the rural, small-town America of past centuries.