When Kinne Stires saw all the pines last fall’s windstorm brought down at Alna’s Juniper Hill School, he said, “There’s my barn.”

Recalling the moment May 31, the Westport Island man, father of the school’s founder-director Anne Stires, said he realized the fallen trees were the wood for a project a long time coming: Building a barn where a beautiful 1800s one stood in his youth on the Golden Ridge Road property. In the mid-1960s, while he was in the Navy, the barn’s roof collapsed under a huge snow load – three feet of snow followed by rain, he said.

“My father tried to deal with it. But he was getting on.” When Stires got out of the Navy in 1967, he helped bring down some of the higher beams. The roof was later replaced and a shed roof added. The barn rotted over the decades and Stires, 73, said he knew it would need to come down, but he had been putting it off.

Then came the windstorm. It tore trees from the ground, blocking the driveway with 14 of them, and forcing the private, non-profit school to close for days. The rotting barn, out of the brunt of the wind, withstood the storm. But the storm had given him the makings of the next one. A logger and other professionals including the new barn’s builder Travis Chapman worked with Stires to turn the fallen trees into wooden pieces for the timber frame barn Stires designed. Parts of the outgoing barn were salvaged before it was brought down.

He and wife Susan, Anne’s mother, own the property the school leases, Anne said. The school plans to own the barn, she said.

"The school community is thrilled about the barn," she wrote in response to email questions. "My parents' forethought and the thought to make a difficult situation after the storm into an exciting prospect for the future is inspiring. We are looking forward to hosting community events, teacher training, school family gatherings, and school productions."

She added, plans call for teacher training institutes at the barn in conjunction with Antioch University. The institutes will serve regional educators and others from across the country and beyond, she wrote. The first workshop, "Teaching with Nature: An Introduction to Forest Kindergartens," is Friday, July 27 to Monday July 30.

Her father and several other people built much of the barn last week against a blue sky and a cooling wind he said were perfect for the work.

What did it mean to him to be finally building the barn on the footprint of the one from his childhood? “That’s a huge question,” he said. “I would say it’s sort of like bookends. On the one end is the beautiful barn from my memories ... playing in it as a teenager ... and in the middle  are a whole bunch of stories, the roof collapsing and other things, and on the other end is this gift that was given to us by the windstorm on Halloween. It made a horrible mess of the woods, but it provided the materials ... and now we have this beautiful structure on a property that was always beautiful except for this one thing that was always kind of a sore for me.

“So this ... completes all those stories in the middle. All those years were leading up to this point, where we have this beautiful structure going up, and that's the other bookend.”

Jefferson’s Alexander Hickey, a mason by trade, was volunteering his help May 31. His and Kristin Shearman’s children Phinnean, 7, and Maeve, 4, attend Juniper Hill. Hickey said he and Shearman like to help there.

Anne Stires recalled the school's families and the community coming to help after the windstorm. "We are grateful and look forward to hosting an event in the fall to honor and thank everyone," she wrote Monday evening.

She said the barn project has been part of second and third graders' year-long study of regional building and architecture with their teacher Leigh Anne Keichline. The rest of the classes have dropped in to learn about each step and the professionals and their tools, she said.