Moving the Star Barn

(Middletown, PA) -- Work has started on an historic barn in the mid state that is getting moved to Lancaster County; crews are disassembling the Star Barn piece by piece.

Each piece of the barn in Dauphin County is getting taken down, numbered, and preserved for reassembly in Lancaster County next year.

The Star Barn, which can be seen off Route 283 in Middletown, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

It dates to the 1870s.

The DAS Companies, which makes automotive accessories, bought the barn in 2014, and is moving it to Lancaster County.

"I see something new every time I go up there. Ooh, I didn't see that before. Ooh, that's new. And it's something that makes it more interesting as you go along because it's not your stick built house and you're just putting up a bunch of them," says Mike Kleinhans, project manager.

He adds: "It's a lot out of the ordinary. There's a lot of things that we've run into that we didn't know we were going to get into because it's not a straight building. We're taking something down and we're putting it back up again, where it has to be looking original."

Kleinhans says they're working diligently to make sure the reassembled barn looks like the original Star Barn. He's hopeful that the barn will eventually become a tourist attraction in Lancaster County. Kleinhans says the Star Barn should be completely ready by either late 2017 or 2018. He says the DAS Companies has brought in contractors from as far away as Illinois and Massachusetts to work on the project.

They're even planning an old-school barn raising event for the community when the time is right.