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A spirited discussion with a group of college friends about our children, gardening, farmer's markets, sports, jobs, livestock, and future goals was quite entertaining and loaded with laughs. Our group was stunned when my wife, Judy, mentioned that she would like to open and operate a Bed & Breakfast on our farm. Our daughters, ages 9-15, sternly objected, as the four of them usually had issues every morning with only one bathroom, plus our house was already full. Judy calmly stated that the inn would not be in our home, but in our cattle shed. I nearly fell off my chair. A WHAT? A B&B? She could NOT be serious. We had never even stayed in a B&B before. What about my cattle shed?
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I have a deep appreciation for the architecture, beauty, and diversity of all barns and have spent a life time playing and working in them. It turned into a hobby of thousands of photographs, barn books, a collection of barn calendars, and a wide variety of functional as well as decorative barn items. The name of our future B&B was to be the Cupola Inn. A cupola (pronounced KYOO-puh-luh) was often mounted on the ridge line of the roof of a barn to allow heat and moisture to escape. Most functional barn cupolas today are metal but in the day of wooden cupolas, it was the master carpenter's signature on the proud structure below.
My cattle shed was built in the 1940's as a 500 hen laying house. When small flocks of chickens got squeezed off a typical farm in the early 1960's, the building was used for small grain storage. It became my cattle shed when the rest of the buildings on our farm were full of hogs. The end of the small (less than 2000 head) hog producers was on the horizon, just as the poultry industry had changed. The timing of a bed & breakfast on our farm could not have been better.
Labor Day 1996 our family started construction on the Cupola Inn Bed & Breakfast and we opened for business 13 months later. My passion for barns continues to this day, and in 2002 we built a round, limestone barn adjacent to the inn to fill with farm antiques and for guests to enjoy.
Discover for yourself the majesty, history, and diversity of barns while enjoying comfort and hospitality in one of four distinctly decorated rooms at the Cupola Inn Bed & Breakfast.
