The Friends of Harrison Park are throwing a birthday party — not for the team of park boosters themselves, but for a 100-year old barn that’s the anchor of the downtown Ellijay walking park.
They will hold Harrison Park’s first-ever Barniversary Saturday, Aug. 12, beginning at 1 p.m.
The century-old Pinson Barn has been the site of an ongoing restoration project that started in 2019. So far, park friends and hired contractors have cleaned out the barn previously used for storage, improved the dirt floor, had lead remediation work done to remove old paint and installed new doors. This week, the barn is receiving three new coats of white paint. The friends hope that work and future restoration projects will help the old barn stand another hundred years.
“Stuff like cleaning, moving things and making the floors look better, the volunteers did that. For something like painting or construction, we hired contractors to do the work,” said Linda Lancaster, of Friends of Harrison Park. “Since 2022, we’ve gotten engineering work done to find out what we need to do to really fortify the barn and, construction-wise, what we need to have done so we can do more things inside the barn.”
Lancaster said the barn was built by farmer Robert Pinson in 1923 on what then was the family farm.
“It was built around the same time as a house he and his wife lived in, and his sister lived in another house that was back behind the barn,” she added. “They lived adjacent to (where the park is now) and farmed the area, growing vegetables and several acres of corn. They had cattle on some of the land, so it was a very active farm at one time.”
The Barniversary will have a throwback theme with several activities like what would’ve been done in the 1920s or ‘30s. Admission is free, and there will also be live music and a food truck on hand, Lancaster noted.
“We’re trying to give families and young people an opportunity to have a fun time without having to spend a lot of money,” she said. “We plan to use the barn like a little movie theater. We’ve got short, old movies and cartoons from back in the day, and we’ll be showing a repeating series of those. People can come in and sit on hay bales and watch them. We’re going to have cake and ice cream and (games like) sack races and a cake walk, the types of things people (from past generations) might remember doing as kids.”
Lancaster said the park friends would like to eventually hold events inside the historic barn, but it will take more work and money to get there.
“It would be great to have the barn fully functional,” she added. “There are lots of things that would need to be done so we can use the upstairs. There wouldn’t need to be nearly as much work done to use the downstairs.”
It’s not known if Barniversary will become a recurring park event. That will depend on if the first one is successful and the type of feedback that’s received, Lancaster noted.
“We could maybe see about doing a birthday party for the barn every five or 10 years,” she added.
Most of the event activities will take place near the barn, which is close to the parking lot, but a new wildflower meadow and pathway is also currently in bloom on the other end of the park, Lancaster noted.
“We’re hoping people will take the time to walk through the wildflower meadow. It’s blooming pretty well right now, and it’s our first year to have real flowers,” she added.