Cranesville pole barn builders

Cranesville is a very small borough in Elk Creek Township, in the county's western farm belt.

What's here. A small village core with farms and scattered rural-residential parcels through the surrounding township.

Ground and site. Elk Creek and its headwater feeders drain this ground north toward the lake, cutting into the terrain as they go.

Cranesville is a small village in Elk Creek Township, in the belt of working farm ground between the lake plain and the county's southern hills. The land here sits above the plain, so it drains better than the lakeside clay, and the headwaters of Elk Creek cut through it on the way north to the lake. The building work is agricultural — equipment and hay storage, livestock housing, and the repair and re-roofing of older barns — with rural-residential garages and shops filling out the rest. Snow is substantial without reaching the extremes of the high eastern ground, and as everywhere in Erie County the ground snow load has to be established locally under the ASCE case-study designation rather than read from a map. Posts have to reach past the 48-inch frost depth, which on this better-draining till ground is a straightforward matter.

Working here. Open township parcels with straightforward access and room for equipment; village lots are small.

Around Cranesville. The work comes from the village centre at the Route 18 and Route 215 area; the Elk Creek headwaters ground; the farm parcels toward the Girard Township line; the ground south toward Conneaut Township and Albion.

On cost here. Open township ground with easy access is an economical place to build, and the drive from Erie is moderate. Cost here is set mostly by the building — sidewall height, door openings, truss span — rather than by the site.

Cranesville is one of the smallest boroughs in Erie County, sitting inside a township of working farms, so the same road can carry village lots and hundred-acre parcels within a few hundred yards.

It sits on the Elk Creek headwaters, which means its ground drains toward the lake through the gorge country downstream in Girard — good drainage locally, and a watershed that matters to everyone below it.

Permits go through Cranesville Borough or Elk Creek Township, which are separate municipalities. Agricultural buildings may qualify for the state UCC exemption; the township still handles zoning, driveway and stormwater approvals regardless. Two approvals, not one: zoning is the municipality's own, while the Uniform Construction Code permit comes either from the municipality or from the third-party agency it has appointed to enforce the code. Ask which arrangement applies here.