Repairing a Stone Wall on a Kentucky Barn

Hi all,

I recently purchased a property in Northern Kentucky that has an old (circa 1870's) barn on the property. The western wall of the barn is acting as a retaining wall. It is roughly 8ft tall and 30ft long. On the non-barn side of the wall is about 6ft of earth, mostly clay. In multiple places, the wall seems to be collapsing, and there are gaps through which you can start to see daylight. This wall also acts as the foundational support for the portion of the wooden barn that sits on top of it. I've included a host of pictures that will hopefully explain my predicament better than I can with words!

So I am sure that I will need to either repair this wall, or build a second form immediately next to this wall for when it inevitably fails. Any thoughts on how I might proceed? I assume that my first step would be to remove as much of the earth pressing on the wall as possible, and install some sort of drainage system to divert as much water away as I can. From there, can I push the wall back to plum, and reinforce it somehow?

Thanks in advance!

Beautiful barn and wall! I hope you can save both of them.

I agree that the best thing to do is dig out the earth behind the wall. Then you could try pushing the tilted part back to plumb. I would get one or more sturdy logs propped up and fitted to the contour of the wall face about 2/3 of the way up, and as many bracing logs with bottle jacks as you can manage to push evenly on the wall. The barn frame would need to be jacked up enough to relieve the load on the wall while you are doing this. I can't tell from the photos how much stability the barn frame without the wall would have, so you might need to add diagonal braces to keep the frame from tipping sideways in any direction.

Once the wall is back, or if you can't manage to move it, I would add some reinforcing buttresses on the earth side to take the bank load. It would be very sad to pour concrete against the visible face of the wall. Backfill with well-draining gravel at the lower half or more, and slope the finished bank surface with a clay-topped swale to carry surface water far away from the barn.


Note that you don't need to add buttresses to the full height of the wall, just to close to where the finished grade will end up. The wall just needs help, not its whole job taken over.

It looks like access to a door is being accessed by the earthen embankment, which is leaning against the stonework.
That embankment is also putting pressure on the wall.
I am guessing water and snow over the years has been adding to the problem.
A solution may be to remove the soil from the wall out a to a distance of a bobcat bucket width, 4 feet
then deal with the wall and reconsider access to that door.
Access may be via a new stone structure or works independent of the existing wall.

Another thing you could do to eliminate the earth load on the wall would be to dig out and either leave a bank with a stable slope clear of the wall, or a new reinforced wall clear of the stone wall, and make a log/beam bridge over the gap to the door.