I knew of several barns where I thought the past might lie.

— E. B. White

The barn was very large. It was very old. For more than a century before E. B. White and his wife, Katharine, purchased the farm in 1933, the barn had stood on a rise above Allen Cove, Me., near the village of North Brooklin. For White, the barn was the center of their 40 acres, even more so than the big white house that was attached to it by an aromatic woodshed. The building united White’s two great writerly loves — barnyard animals and Maine. During his long career he wrote about everything from the predictability of radio preachers to the emotional fallout from nuclear dread, but he meditated upon farm animals and Maine life with particular affection.

The barn’s handmade stanchions and hoof-scarred planking conjured visions irresistible to a man who had spent his childhood caring for animals in his family’s stable in Mount Vernon, N.Y., in the first decade of the century. In his youth he groomed horses, kept a hutch of big-eyed rabbits, tended a whole aviary of birds — chickens and ducks, turkeys and geese. He noticed spider webs trapping unwary insects. Barely more than a toddler, he was the first to realize that three eggs abandoned as infertile were hatched by the natural warmth of the manure pile where they had been tossed, as if miraculously brought to life by the barn itself.

For White, it was only natural that barns would also be bathed in symbolism. Every Christmas his mother displayed by their decorated tree the toy farm from her own childhood — wooden sheep and cows clustered before a barn, with overhead a gentle nighttime sky. “My dream farm,” she called it. Although it was a secular scene, young Elwyn Brooks White saw it in a sacred light. One day decades later, after buying the Maine farm, White trimmed lambs and realized he had left their wool looking as much like the toy lambs of his childhood as like the farming magazine photo he used as a guide.

White had loved Maine since early childhood, when his family began spending a glorious month there every summer, in part to discourage his hay fever. Rustic cabins with their rusty screened windows, a canoe in dawn fog, sun-warmed gray wooden docks, fishing from a boat while a moss-lidded bait can waited at his feet — the annual sojourns left such memories surrounded with a golden nostalgia White recalled all his life.