Perry Clabbatz, of Spartanburg, PA, recently earned his 15 minutes of fame by shooting video of his neighbors moving a house. What made the move special was the manner in which it was done; Clabbatz’s neighbors are Amish, so instead of using hydraulic jacks, rollers, and a motorized vehicle, they enlisted 80 men from the local Amish community to give the building the old heave-ho. After lifting the house by hand they carried it about 50 feet and placed it onto a new foundation. This method of moving buildings is more common than one might imagine. A quick search of YouTube turned up examples from around the world--and those are just ones we have video of. Here are three such videos from the USA: the first shows Clabbatz’s neighbors moving a house, the second a group of non-Amish volunteers moving a barn in Nebraska in the late 1980s, and the third an Amish community moving a barn in Wisconsin. The estimated weight of the barn in Nebraska was 20,000 pounds so each of the 350 volunteers who lifted it had to carry approximately 57 pounds.
