Waterford - A few days ago while John O'Neill was driving down Rope Ferry Road toward Niantic to grab dinner, he noticed an absence on the right side of the road a short distance from the Niantic River Bridge.

"I saw lights where I shouldn't have seen lights and I thought, wait a minute, what's missing," O'Neill, chairman of Waterford's Historic Properties Commission, recalled thinking.

What was missing was the nearly 3,000-square-foot gambrel-roofed barn that once housed cows at the MacKenzie family dairy farm. Townsfolk have called the structure, which until recently stood at 317 Rope Ferry Road, a landmark.

Bristol-based A & L Development oversaw demolition of the Mac Kenzie barn Wednesday. The firm's owner, Rich Lemieux, said the barn was too unstable to leave standing.

Lemieux, who also owns A & L's parent firm, Nova Developers, plans to build 14 single-family homes on the land where the barn stood. The development is to be called Sea View Estate at MacKenzie Farm.

Lemieux said there were holes in the floor and the roof of the barn. He originally had estimated that demolition would take six or seven hours, but it took only three.

"Nothing was salvageable at all," he said, later adding that demolition was the safest option in case someone tried to go inside.

Town Clerk and Municipal Historian Robert Nye said the barn was built in the 1930s by the Mac Kenzie family, who owned one of the town's larger dairy farms when agriculture was a big industry in Waterford.

The farm at one time spanned from Daniels Avenue to the Niantic River, totalling more than 100 acres, according to Nye.

Adjacent to the barn site - now home to a pile of rubble Lemieux said will take weeks to remove - is a roughly 3,500-square-foot house that land records from the town assessor's office state was built in the latter half of the 19th century.

The chain of ownership of the land went as thus, according to Nye: the Caulkins family owned the land starting in the 17th century, leasing it for a school site in 1836; in 1855, the Caulkins deeded the land to Savilion Chapman, who served in the state House of Representatives.

Documents pertaining to the land from the Caulkins family reference a family cemetery.

"So, somewhere back there, there's likely someone buried," said Nye, who discovered the reference to the cemetery while researching the barn.

In 1918, Chapman's heirs sold the land to a man named Hugh MacKenzie, according to Nye.

MacKenzie married Nettie Edwards in 1922, according to town vital records. The couple's daughter, Margaret, was born in 1923 and son, Hugh, in 1924.

For a total of 10 years, beginning in 1953, the younger Hugh represented Waterford in the Connecticut General Assembly in Hartford. He was a member of the Waterford Board of Selectmen from 1957 to 1963 and served as the town's first selectman from 1963 to 1967. He died in 2013.

His sister passed in 2008, having spent the majority of her life living on the property. She left for a period while working at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., during World War II.

The property stayed in the family until 2011, when Old Lyme-based White Knight Development LLC purchased it for $533,000.

White Knight subdivided the land within the past year, and last month sold the majority of the land to A & L at a price of $975,000.

White Knight retained the portion of land containing the house. The firm wrote in an April 2014 letter addressed to neighbors that it planned to demolish the barn and would put the house up for sale. Ultimately, demolition became the responsibility of A & L.

Lemieux said White Knight already achieved the necessary town approvals to make the new development possible. Construction is slated to begin in late spring.

Cameron MacKenzie, daughter of the younger Hugh MacKenzie, described the interior of the barn.

"The view inside was amazing. You'd look up and see the craftsmanship. There was really nothing like it that I had seen - you'd go upstairs in the big barn, you'd open the door, throw the door open, and the view of the bay was amazing," she said.

Cameron lived in the family house briefly as a young child, returning in the 1990s for a spell before attending law school. She lived in the house a third time with her aunt Margaret from the late 1990s until the house sold. She still lives in Waterford and works as the criminal caseflow coordinator for the New London judicial district.

Cecily Armentrout of Old Saybrook recalled spending the summer of 1943, when she was 17 years old, milking 60 cows in the barn. She worked at the farm as part of the Women's Land Army with her classmate Nancy Kidder.

The New York Herald Tribune ran a photo of Armentrout - maiden name Brown - with a June 1943 article titled "Farmerette Finds Cow Has Personality," about the farming program. The program brought women from cities and towns to farms to take the place of men who had left to fight in World War II.

Armentrout, who grew up in Charlottesville, Va., spoke Thursday about ice-cold baths and long days milking, pasteurizing and bottling milk - experiences that opened her eyes to farm life. Pasteurization and bottling took place in a smaller barn located near the main barn. The smaller barn also has been demolished.

"We worked harder than we ever thought we'd work in our lives," Armentrout said in a phone interview. She said she and her St. Anne's School classmate were solely responsible that summer for the milking process.

Cameron said the property ceased serving as a farm by the time she was born in 1967. The barn was used from then on for storage of items ranging from property belonging to Millstone power station to theater props to boat parts.

Soon after the family ceased to run the dairy, they sold part of the land for what is now a neighborhood. Many residents of that neighborhood had developed a fondness for the now-destroyed barn, just as the MacKenzie family had.

"We kind of just admired it. It was definitely just something to admire," said High Ridge Drive resident Megan Goldschneider, 14, on Wednesday evening. Goldschneider had organized an impromptu field trip to the site of the demolition for her 12-year-old brother Dylan and his middle school classmates when they got off the bus after school Wednesday.

The siblings' mother, Margaret, said her husband, Dave, had come home during his lunch break to take photos of the barn as it was being demolished.

The MacKenzie barn was among the roughly 8,000 structures the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation featured as part of its Historic Barns of Connecticut project.

The goal of the project was to document old barns and identify those that might merit recognition by the state historic register, according to CT Trust Deputy Director Christopher Wigren, with the ultimate goal of preserving some of the barns.

"Barns are part of our identity as a state, as a place and even as localities, as well," Wigren said Friday. "When you lose barns, you're chipping away a part of that identity."

t.townsend@theday.com

Twitter: @ConnecticuTess