This barn proclaims its original name, “Otter Creek Stock Farm,” and date, “1911,” in patterned slates across a gambrel roof. More than one hundred and forty feet long, it is a monumental example of a twentieth-century ground-stable barn design that would dominate farm animal housing in Vermont for the next half century. It is also the last great barn built by Bowman Crosby, who developed a large stockyard surrounding the 1872 Whiting depot on the Addison Branch of the Rutland and Burlington Railroad. Even before the depot, this broad, rolling portion of Whiting was a stock-gathering point, located on the drovers' route to Boston (VT 30). During the Civil War, a large stockyard here supplied beef and mules for the Union Army via the railroad depot in neighboring Leicester. Crosby eventually amassed a nine-hundred-acre farm, and in the 1890s was said to be the single largest shipper of livestock to the Boston market. By putting his farm name in slate on this mammoth barn, which has no fewer than five metal roof-ridge ventilators, Crosby commemorated not only his success but the success of the Addison County stock-raising industry that largely disappeared after World War I.