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The Barn Event Center of the Smokies allows visitors to step back in time and dine in a building which represents East Tennessee's past.

This cantilever barn, which is located at 7264 E. Lamar Alexander Parkway in Townsend, is ideal for visitors who are looking to hold destination events. The event center welcomes wedding receptions, baby showers, anniversaries, private dinner parties and family and class reunions. The center also provides outside catering. Andrea Mervin, the Barn Event Center's manager, said they can arrange events with as little as a week's notice.

One of Townsend's more appealing qualities for tourists is how low-key it is, and how everybody treats you like they've always known you, she said. "Every part would be truly unique for those (people) who have never seen anything like this," Mervin said.

The event center provides a "private and personal atmosphere for your own special event" that is unlike anywhere else, she said. Several families have rented out the hall and they have said they loved the intimacy of their events, Mervin said. The building is only for those renting it and the staff tries to make every event special, she said.

Cantilever barns are pioneer farm structures. Their main feature is an overhang which supports a large second-story loft atop one or more log cribs on the bottom story. Documentary evidence on these barns is very scarce, but most seem to have been built from 1870 to about 1915, by second- or third-generation settlers, according to the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture.

Fieldwork in the 1980s found six cantilever barns in Virginia, three in North Carolina and 316 cantilever in East Tennessee. Of those 316 barns, researchers found 183 in Sevier County, 106 in Blount County and the remaining 27 scattered from Johnson to Bradley Counties, according to the encyclopedia.

Largest on record

The Barn Event Center is the largest cantilever barn on record at 50 feet by 90 feet. The roof support is a traditional mortise and tendon wood-pegged timber design similar to those built in the 1800s. The center's cribs are made with logs from an 1860 tobacco cantilever barn from Rogersville. The 4,500-foot great room is supported by three major beams with 10-foot scarf joints that are some of the largest on record. The timbers used to build these beams came from a dead stand of trees in Canada and were shipped to Oliver Springs where they were milled by Blue Heron Timber Works.

Owner/builder Richard Way said the event center's timber frame structure goes back to this country's original settlers. East Tennessee days are humid and cantilevers could keep their equipment and goods dry, and made them easier to access, Way said. Their unusual design may be derived from German forebay barns, which were built into the Pennsylvania hillside, he said.

'Basis for America'

People have told Way that he built something indicative of the region which people can't find anywhere else, he said. These barns are the structural basis for America, Way said. "They are very significant when you talk about America because it is the history of America," he said.

A barn's timber frame structure could be built on the ground and stood up like at a traditional barn raising, Way said. They weren't doing this in Europe because they had the machinery to lift it up, he said.

History envelopes visitors everywhere in the event center. The barn is decorated with antique tools and equipment, carriages and freight wagons. Visitors can see a local blind man's antique broom making set, a Blount County doctor's buggy and so much more. The leaded glass front doors were purchased at an antique shop in Knoxville's Old City and were said to have come from an old English pub.

The Great Smoky Mountain Heritage Center will show people how the settlers lived, worked and played in the mountain regions, Mervin said. After visiting the heritage center, you should "eat in a building which represents (this) past," she said. "People have lost a lot, and places like this kept the past alive," Mervin said.