Laurens-Area Barn Hosted Dances, Boxing Matches
A trip through northwest Iowa recently got me thinking about a barn story that's worth sharing.
“If these old walls could talk” could be the calling card of Jerry Sobotka’s century-old barn five and a half miles south of Laurens—but the stories would have plenty of wild twists and turns.
Roy and Annie McCormick built this 32-foot by 50-foot barn in Marshall Township around 1920, complete with nine dairy stanchions on the west and horse stalls on the east. “Some of the supplies to build the barn came from Albert City,” noted Sobotka, whose family has farmed in Pocahontas County since 1922.
Roy McCormick wasn’t a typical 1920s farmer, though. As a young man, he had performed as a sharp shooter in the famed Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, a whose 30-year run concluded in Davenport, Iowa, in 1913.
After McCormick started farming in Pocahontas County, he sometimes hosted a rodeo on his farm on Saturdays and a baseball game on Sunday afternoons. “They say 400 to 500 people would come out here,” Sobotka said, noting that the spectators traveled via dirt roads, long before county road N28 west of the farm was paved.
The McCormick’s barn was also a hub of entertainment. E. B. Pannkuk, who helped establish the Laurens State Bank in 1935, was a Golden Gloves boxer who competed in boxing matches in the 1930s and 1940s—including some in the McCormick’s barn, Sobotka said.
In addition, the McCormicks hosted barn dances from time to time. “My grandfather, Jerry Sobotka, played French horn and an accordion in a band that performed in this barn,” Sobotka said.
If all that weren’t enough, Roy McCormick (who had written some poems on the barn walls through the years) was a trained chiropractor who provided exams and chiropractic adjustments in his farmhouse north of the barn. Sobotka has seen McCormick’s old record books, which noted that exams cost 50 cents. If patients timed their visits right, they could also purchase a home-cooked dinner from Annie for an additional 50 cents, or supper for an extra $1.
The McCormicks auctioned off their farm equipment in 1938 and moved to Des Moines in 1958. “My family rented the farm from Roy and Annie McCormick’s son, Loyal, (a surgeon in San Diego, California) and his wife, Betty,” Sobotka said.
In the 1990s, the Sobotka family found something quite unexpected in the barn—the upper left side of man’s skull. “I called the Pocahontas County sheriff to report it,” Sobotka said. It turned out that the partial skull was likely connected to Roy McCormick’s chiropractic training at Drake University decades ago.
After the Sobotka family acquired the acreage in 2005, the time-worn barn created a stark contrast to the new home Sobotka built on the property in 2009. The barn’s cupola was full of holes. The roof was leaking. The entire building was leaning to the west.
“I was ready to put a match to it, but as I stood inside that old barn, I started thinking about my grandfather,” said Sobotka, who recalled baling hay when he was growing up and filling the haymow with those bales. “My family raised sheep in that barn in the late 1960s and 1970s. I also thought about the homemade mechanical bull my son, John, had in the barn when he was in high school.”
Instead of demolishing the barn, Sobotka decided to bring it back to life. In 2011, he hired Simpson Construction Co. in Marathon to fix the sagging barn. Scott Simpson installed metal braces on the north and south ends of the haymow. “This barn is stronger than ever,” said Sobotka, who noted that the renovations also included spray-foam insulation, new vinyl windows, updated electrical wiring and lighting and a heating system.
The barn even includes a “new” old cupola. “I paid a neighbor $100 for one that used to be on a barn 1 mile east of this barn,” Sobotka said.
In 2023, Sobotka hired Jeff Vial of Vial Construction in Pocahontas to install red steel siding on the barn’s exterior. Sobotka currently uses the barn for storage and has a trampoline in the haymow for his grandkids. “People ask me when moved this barn to my place. They can hardly believe it’s been here all along.”
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