This barn was once used as a dry house. It was owned by Ken LeRoy in the early 1900s. According to Steve LeRoy, who was Ken LeRoy's grandson, Ken still used this barn in the 1950s and 60s to make some of the most potent hard cider around. The hard cider was used for family and friends consumption.

Today it is owned by Mike and Julie Beckens. 

This barn was once used as a dry house.

It was owned by Ken LeRoy in the early 1900s. The part of the barn made of fieldstones was where the furnace used for drying the apples was located.

Today it is owned by Mike and Julie Beckens. 

Sodus, always a large fruit producing area in Wayne County, developed an important business in the buying, packing and shipping of dried fruits. A handbill dated 1870 and printed to promote the business of four dried fruit dealers in Sodus, urged dryers to produce good quality dried apples and they would receive a fair price and aid the dealers in “establishing a good reputation for our dried fruit in other markets.” Those who produced poor quality dried fruit, half-pared, half-cored and half-dried were reminded that they would receive a low price for their product or as stated in closing — “poor fruit, we do not want at any price.”

The use of dry houses for drying fruit, especially apples, became widespread during the last half of the nineteenth century. In a dry house, five steps are involved in turning fresh apples into dried apples — peeling and coring, trimming, bleaching, slicing or quartering and drying.

Most of the dry houses in Wayne County used kiln dryers. The sliced apples were spread out on the kiln floor made of basswood slats placed close together. Space was left between the slats, allowing heat from the furnace below to rise and dry the fruit. The bottom edges of the slats were beveled in order to provide better air circulation. The slats were oiled about once a week with a lubricant such as mineral oil or salt pork to keep the apples from sticking.

The heat to dry the apples was provided by a furnace underneath the kiln floor. Coke was most commonly used to fuel the furnace. Ward Buhlmann remembers that —

coke made a hotter, quicker and faster fire and you could dry more apples with it. Of course we’d melt the furnaces up every year and have to renew the staves and a lot of the grates but it really made heat. It would take about a ton of fuel to dry a ton of apples.

The temperature in the kilns would often rise to 120 degrees. The furnace had to be tended around the clock to keep it hot and to guard against the chance of fire. Since dry houses were made mostly of wood and were exposed to extremes of heat, fires were not uncommon. Ward Buhlmann recalls that —

in the kiln rooms it was so hot that you couldn’t touch the wood. Never had a fire outside of a couple little flare ups. I happened to be right there and see it and squirt the hose on and put it out. But never had one burn down due to the heat of the kiln.

According to Norton Waterman, retired fruit processor in Ontario, dry house fires were “very hot and at times they got away from them. Dry house fires were very common, in fact, it got so it was hard to get insurance for them because so many of them burned down.”

The apples on the kiln floor required periodic turning in order to even the drying process and prevent the fruit from burning. Drying took from fifteen to twenty hours depending on how thick the apples were piled on the kiln floor and how hot the heat was from the fire. Many commercial dry houses operated four to six kilns, often using one for drying the waste, and the others for drying the apples. The peels and cores from the waste kiln were sold to be processed for pectin.

After being removed from the kiln, the dried apples were piled in a curing area where their moisture content would become uniform. Norton Waterman, Whose family was in the dried apple business in the early part of the century, remembers that by law, apples had to be dried so that they contained no more than 24% moisture. Most dry house operators were able to test the dryness of apple slices by feel. Samples were also sent to laboratories in Rochester for analysis.

When the apples were ready to be brought to market from small family-owned country dry houses, they were placed in cloth bags and brought to middlemen. These middlemen then packed the apples in twenty-five or fifty pound boxes and in turn sold them to dealers and exporters. Many dried apples were exported to Europe where fruit was not so plentiful. Dried fruits were easily shipped without harm from cold and took a fraction of the space needed for barrels of fresh fruit.

Drying continued to be a major method for preserving fruit in the County until the 1920s. With the introduction of cold storage in the early twentieth century, the increase in canning factories in the County and a decrease in the exporting of dried apples to Europe, the market for dried fruits was diminishing. However, a few dry houses continued to operate as late as the 1950s and many County residents living today have vivid memories of working in them.