Youngstown native Robert Kroeger, who now lives in Cincinnati, stands in front of a barn door from 1840.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of a series of Saturday profiles of area residents and their stories. To suggest a profile, contact features editor Burton Cole at bcole@tribtoday.com or metro editor Marly Reichert at mkosinski@tribtoday.com,

By MARLY REICHERT

Staff writer

YOUNGSTOWN — A surprise anniversary trip in September 2012 to Licking County set Youngstown native Robert Kroeger on a mission that turned into a passion that soon will become a book, “Historic Barns of Ohio.”

“I looked up and saw an old gray barn on a hillside, its roof sagging, boards missing, paint weathered and a bit tilted,” Kroeger, 74, said. “Then a powerful message came — hard to describe, almost like a thunderbolt between my eyes: ‘You’re going to paint this barn, write an essay about it, and preserve Ohio history.’ It was incredibly real, almost surreal, maybe supernatural.”

But he was a retired dentist, not an artist.

“I chose dentistry for its independence and because I could work with people one on one. I wrote two books on treating dental phobics, which became my niche. Although my dad was an artist — a Notre Dame graduate with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree — I did only a smattering of painting as a youngster. I loved being a dentist,” Kroeger said.

Now he had a new mission.

“I knew that to do a good painting, one must be able to draw. So I studied, took workshops, took lessons and critiques for years with a skilled local artist, and chose oil as a medium with palette knives in the impasto (thick) technique. I also began to make frames from barn siding, sometimes framing the painting in the barn’s own wood. I paint on Masonite as my dad did.”

MOLARS, BOOKS AND BARNS

Kroeger was born in November 1946 at St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital. His father, Frank, got home from World War II in early 1946 and married Isobel, who grew up in Youngstown. The pair dated during the war years, and the family of six lived in a small home in Boardman built for returning soldiers.

“The house had two bedrooms and one bathroom with a tub,” Kroeger recalled.

As the only boy and eldest sibling in a family of four children, Kroeger got his own bedroom while his three sisters shared the attic.

His parents are deceased and his sister, Jeanne, lives in Poland. The others, Nancy and Mary Beth, reside out of town.

He went to grade school at St. Charles School in Boardman and attended Cardinal Mooney High School for one year. After Mooney, he went away to school in New York and then graduated from The Ohio State University in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree and earned a medical degree from OSU in 1973.

Kroeger joined the Navy and married a woman from Dayton while serving four years as a Navy dentist. When his Navy tour ended, they settled in Cincinnati in 1977, where he started a general dentistry practice that he sold in 2010.

He has been writing books for a long time, mostly about golf courses in Scotland, Wales, Ireland and England. For several years, he was an adjunct professor at the University of Kentucky dental school.

His first wife died in early 2007 and Kroeger said he took comfort in their five children (Kim, Rob, Jon, David and Michael) but like most widowers, he was “lost.” He eventually married a woman named Laura, whom he met online.

In addition to his five children, who all live in Cincinnati, Kroeger has eight grandchildren. Laura has two children in California and one grandchild.

In September 2012, Laura selected rural Licking County, about an hour east of Columbus, as the couple’s “surprise” anniversary trip. It was on that trip that he saw the old gray barn as they turned down the road to a bed and breakfast. That night, he and Laura talked it over during dinner and made plans to investigate. The next morning, Kroeger knocked on the 1830 farmhouse door and explained his strange message to the barn owner, who he described as “an old man, who grumpily answered the door.”

“After I told him about it, he was very nice and gave me the history of the place. I call the barn Granville Gray and visited it last spring for photos for the book. It’s tilted more now, but still standing. The book has the before (2012) and the after (2020) photos,” Kroeger said.

His passion is painting pictures of old barns across the country. He has done 950 of them so far, including several in the Mahoning Valley. He also researches the history of the barns and writes an accompanying essay about each one.

“My hope is that each painting finds a happy home and that, 50 to 100 years from now, if someone sees the painting and reads the essay, he or she will realize the hard work of the early pioneers and the role that the old barn played,” Kroeger said. “I also enjoy taking barn tours with my barn scouts, meeting barn owners, and going inside old barns. Every time I see hand-hewn beams, timber-framed with mortise and tenon joints held together by wooden pegs, it takes my breath away.”

THE PROJECT

“My first goal was to visit each of Ohio’s 88 counties and find at least one old barn to paint, ideally with a good story to write about it. Finally, I finished the project in the spring of 2020, though I resolved to continue to explore Ohio and paint its barns. That spring I began my Round Barns Project, which is also a multi-year endeavor — to capture round barns (circular or polygonal) in about 35 states. These, too, are full of history and represent an interesting era in American architecture. Many are on the National Register of Historic Places,” Kroeger said.

He said almost two years ago, a representative from Arcadia Publishing / The History Press contacted him about doing a book. Although he had planned to do one a few years from now, he said he’s glad he went with this publisher since they have done an “excellent job” through the entire process. “Historic Barns of Ohio” will be released in March. He said he hopes to do some book signings in the Youngstown area this fall.

He visited Trumbull County in the spring of 2018 and the nine barn paintings that resulted from his visit were auctioned off as a fundraiser for SMARTS. One of the barns was in Kinsman.

This fall, an exhibit of 88 barn paintings, one from each Ohio county, will be displayed in the famous 1881 Muhlhauser barn. The paintings will be auctioned for local nonprofits in West Chester, a township in Butler County near Cincinnati. It was supposed to be this spring, but has been postponed because of the pandemic.

For those who want to see Kroeger’s paintings and read the essays, he has started daily postings of each county on a Facebook page — the historic barn project.

This winter, Kroeger said he will be working on paintings and essays of barns he visited in northeastern Ohio and northern Indiana last fall.

RELIVING HIS OWN HISTORY

In the late 1960s, Kroeger’s dad was commissioned by his boss, who owned the Headwaters Farm (named for having the source of the Mill Creek), to do some Christmas card stuff.

“I remembered seeing his drawing of the stone-encased spring, which I loved. In May of 2019, I got reconnected with this drawing, thanks to Andy Varsho of Hubbard, now one of my barn scouts, who found me on the internet and sent it to me. Andy bought an auction lot of my dad’s paintings (he’s an ardent art collector), which included the drawing. Again, thanks to Andy and a snail-mail letter, the current owner of the Headwaters Farm, allowed us to visit last fall. Fifty years after my dad did his drawing of the spring, I did an oil painting, both of which will be in a SMARTS fundraiser later this year,” Kroeger said.

While chronicling the history of Trumbull County barns, Kroeger also ended up reliving some of his own history. In addition to the barns, Kroeger did a painting of the former Republic Steel blast furnace. He was in the area two years ago to photograph barns in Mahoning and Columbiana counties when he read about its demolition in 2016. It was the last blast furnace still standing in a region that once had more than two dozen.