If it could talk, the old barn would charm listeners with its history.
Besides the squeals of laughter from the children playing in its
third story hayloft, the rumble of wagons rolling in, the terrified
braying of two mules that once bolted from second floor windows,
the walls resound with another tale.

More than once in the 1870's, outlaw Sam Bass who robbed
stagecoaches, trains and banks from Nebraska to the Dakota
Territory to Texas - slipped into the barn and switched a tired
horse for a fresh one from the Medlin Brother's string.

"He rode in on the second floor and left his horse", said retired
air force Col. Don Nance, who has leased the barn the past 14
years for an equestrian center. "He dropped down through the
hay hole and got a fresh horse."

Although a legend has sprung up that Bass and his gang hid out
in the barn, Roanoke resident Mary Carpenter, 78, a descendant
of the Medlin Family, wants to set the record straight.

"He did not hide in the barn", Carpenter said. "Bass stole horses
from the Medlins. They would not have tried to protect Bass."
The outlaw's hideout was in a cave near Grapevine Lakes North
Shore, she said.

"It's not very far," she said. "A couple of miles from the barn."

The pioneer Medlin Brothers, Charles and Lewis, moved with
20 other families to the Roanoke area from Missouri in 1844.
Charles and Matilda Medlin settled in Roanoke and Lewis near
Grapevine, Carpenter said.

Carpenter's grandfather, William Owen Medlin, a Confederate
veteran of the Civil War, was the oldest son of Charles Medlin.
James Wilson Medlin, who built the barn, was his second son.

William and James raised horses, Carpenter said. "They were
very close." Before building the barn, James Medlin traveled to
Pennsylvania and studied some of the barns as models, a Denton
County history book says. When the barn was finished, legend
says Medlin showed it off to his neighbors by driving a team of
young mules onto the ground level second floor entrance at the
rear. "They were relatively unbroken mules," Nance says.

The mules saw the daylight at the front end of the barn and bolted
for the tall open windows.

"They jumped from the second floor," Nance says. "One was killed
and the other had to be cut from the harness."

Carpenter who grew up in Roanoke, recalls playing in the Medlin
barn as a child. It was owned then by her mothers cousin, Louisa
Medlin Gibson, James Wilson Medlin's daughter.

The cupola wasn't just ornamental or a pigeon roost, Carpenter
said. "It had some type of windmill in it. When the wind would blow,
that thing would turn and grind their food."

"I hope I'm not here if it is torn down," he said. "it's a grand old barn."