Rebuilding history

By Alec Woolsey - Herald-Zeitung

 

David Snell is in the process of building history. Well, rebuilding to be exact.

Snell purchased land in New Braunfels and has been working for several months to make the town his home. He said after years of running his business in Houston he is ready to head for the Hill Country. What makes his story stand out is that it is televised.

Snell is in the process of modernizing reclaimed cabin and barn structures from West Virginia that were reassembled on the show “Barnwood Builders” which airs on DIY Network.

The show describes itself as, “Six good-natured West Virginians travel the heartland saving pioneer log cabins and building gorgeous modern homes with reclaimed lumber.”

The show stars Mark Bowe and is currently in its fifth season. Snell’s property was featured in a previous episode in February and featured the cabin that is being built, but it has returned to New Braunfels for the assembly of his nearby barn.

“We worked out this deal where they shipped all this down and they came and put the cabin up and then they went ahead and put the barn up,” Snell said.

He said the process took six to eight months to complete, and that’s just for the structure. The projects still have work being done to bring them up to use. The focus of Sunday’s episode is the barn.

“It’s enormous,” said Sean McCourt, the executive producer of Barnwood Builders. “It is a timber-frame barn and it was hand-hewn. That means it was cut by hand during the pioneer era. I believe this one was from the 1830s and it is this huge barn. What makes it really unique in our world is it has this thing in the center of it called a swing beam, which I had never seen before. All these barns, because they are hand-hewn, are unique. This one is particularly different and really, really beautiful and really, really big.”

Snell said the original idea was for him to have a cabin built on the property, but not just any cabin. As he recalled, he had a print of an old, rustic cabin hanging in his office since the 1980s and wanted to build something like that.

He said he and his wife were watching an episode of Barnwood Builders one night and, at his wife’s suggestion, emailed the team about working together to make his dream a reality.

“Yeah, I sent him an email on a Sunday, and the next day I get this call from West Virginia,” Snell said. “Now, my business does work all around the country. Now, we have some business in West Virginia, so I think it’s a customer and he says it’s Mark Bowe on the phone. Finally, I say, ‘Oh, bullcrap. Someone’s playing a joke on me.’ I didn’t believe he would call me the next day, and he’s the head of the show.

“He’s the main character in the show. And he said, ‘No, I’m serious.’ I said, ‘Who put you up to this?’ I thought it was my buddies playing a joke on me.”

The cabin was the main goal, but eventually, Bowe reached out to him again with an offer for a barn they had taken down.

McCourt said the crew likes to explore the towns they shoot episodes in.

“In this episode, they get cowboy hats made at a local hat maker in New Braunfels,” he said. “I believe it was called High Brehm Hats. And they also visited a 19th-century limestone barn in New Braunfels.”

McCourt said this barn is unlike any barn someone would have found in the 1800s in Texas, and that’s part of what makes it special.

“In New Braunfels, and it’s part of what we go through in the show, the trees didn’t grow tall and straight like they did back on the prairie, so back in the era when these barns were being built in the midwest, in Texas they were building with limestone because that’s what they had,” he said. “And so, what they guys love about that is they visit this barn that is in amazing shape that was built at about the same time as the barns that they usually work with and build.”

For Snell, the television aspect of the project is secondary.

“I didn’t care about the television side of it, but there is a good chance that my grand-kids will get married there and if we’ve got really good friends or family that want to get married, it could be a really good wedding venue,” he said. “But that’s not my goal.”

Snell said he wanted to get a piece of property to call home and take care of.

“I mean, I’ve taken this piece of property and turned it into a golf course,” he said. “Not literally, but it’s very well manicured and I’ve worked diligently for about a year and a half to make this place something really special.”