Maybe questions can be stupid after all.

The woman walked into the Round Barn Farm Market, picked up a postcard at the cash register and looked at the picture of the barn.

“Oh, where is this barn?” she asked.

Standing inside the green-and-white barn — 87 feet in diameter and more than 60 feet high — the market workers didn’t know what to say.

“They’re all looking at her, ’Well, you’re standing in it,’” said Tonya White, co-owner of Knouse Fruitlands, which runs the market out of the barn. “How do you answer that question without going, ’Yo. Earth to lady.’”

Most people pull into the parking lot because the only round barn in Adams County looms over them as they drive along Cashtown Road, on their way to or from Arendtsville. They see the cupola at the top of the barn and the wooden pieces that form a building with a 282-foot circumference.

Then they walk inside, not just to buy the peaches from the orchard on the same property, but to try to understand how the barn was built in 1914 — and has remained standing in Franklin Township since then.

What goes around: Inside, the market workers can tell them about Daniel Sheely, who had seen a round barn in Hershey, and convinced his father, Noah, to build one on their farm.

“The family, by those standards, was pretty well-to-do,” White said. “Really what they wanted was something nobody else had, and maybe a little showy too.”

The architect, Morris Rhodes, rode his bike from Chambersburg every day to work on the barn. And of the 38 beams that stretch across the inside of the barn — like the spokes of a wheel — 37 are individual pieces of timber.

This barn was built to last. But improvements have also been made over time.

“Apparently just after this barn was built, within a year after it was built, the roof was blown off,” said White, standing on the barn’s second floor. Looking up into the wooden skeleton that supports the domed roof, White pointed to the beams that were added to keep the roof intact.

“I’d hate to find this laying across the street in the yard,” she said, smiling.

When Knouse Fruitlands bought the property in 1985, they knew they wanted to open a market in the barn, White said. They replaced the deteriorating slate roof with cedar shakes.

“Slate would have been prohibitively expensive if we could have found that much,” White said.

Today, White owns the Round Barn farm with her mother, Janet Knouse, and her brothers, Milton and Brian Knouse. White’s grandfather, M.E. Knouse, was the first president and CEO of the Knouse Foods Cooperative, of which Knouse Fruitlands is part.

Entertaining ideas: Since the barn opened as a seasonal market in 1994, the family has thought of other ideas for expanding the operation there — beyond a market to a tourist destination.

“We’d like to start developing this into an entertainment farm,” said White, who has reserved three domain names for a future Web site for the farm. Right now they rely on a billboard on Route 30 and word of mouth to bring people to the market, eight miles west of Gettysburg.

“We get a lot of tourists from Gettysburg, and we get a lot of people that are traveling the Route 30 corridor and see the sign and say, ’A round barn, let’s go see it,’” she said.

This fall, the farm will offer people the chance to pick their own pumpkins. And White hopes by then to have the beginnings of a petting zoo of farm animals behind the barn.

The empty second floor — which helps visitors understand how the barn was built — is used for storage of farm equipment. But White has other plans.

“We’ve had all kinds of suggestions — restaurants, wedding receptions,” said White, who sees the space as a possible museum of farm equipment.

White also sees potential in a combination smokehouse and springhouse on the property. The stone structure is intact but it needs to be cleaned. Black snakes have shed their skins and left them hanging from the rafters inside.

And White would like to hang a museum of photos of the barn in operation inside the silo, which rises in the center of the barn and could hold 145 tons of silage.

“There are very few people alive who remember the barn in operation, so you talk to them when you can,” White said.

The Sheelys had their barn built as a bank barn — a style used for many Pennsylvania barns. So White wonders whether it is the only remaining round barn that is also a bank barn, with doors on the second story that open at ground level to a rising bank.

Efficient farming: Round barns were originally built by the Shakers, who believed the circle was the perfect shape — and efficient for farm operations, especially with dairy cows.

Troughs were built in two concentric circles around the silo, so the farmworkers could walk in one circle to feed the cows, and then in other circles to milk them. White doesn’t believe the Sheelys used this barn for dairy cattle, but the troughs would have fed the beef cattle who stood in the stalls.

“The back end of the cow would have been here, the front end of the cow would have been there,” she said, pointing over the former troughs.

Today the troughs are covered with wooden shelves, and items from honeycombs to clothespin bags, from mechanical flying cows to ghost windsocks, from apple nightlights to stuffed reindeer. As more apples start arriving in early September, the craft items are pushed deeper into the barn, and the shelves are filled with local apples.

On its 188 acres, Knouse Fruitlands raises cherries, peaches, nectarines, plums, apples, corn and pumpkins. Some customers come to the barn just because it is a local market, White said.

“For local people in our area, there’s a market on every corner. So somebody isn’t going to run from the other side of the county to my farm market to buy a peach when they’ve got a grower right down the road,” she said.

At a time when most farmers had a small orchard for their own use, Noah Sheely developed the first commercial fruit operation in the county. As his orchard thrived, other farmers followed him into the business.

But few others followed him in building a round barn. Today, a polygonal barn stands on Route 97 near Littlestown, but Sheely’s is the only round barn in the county. A Web site of round barns lists 13 polygonal barns and four round barns in Pennsylvania.

“What’s happened to most round barns, people buy the property, they’re in disrepair, and they just plow ’em over,” White said.

Don’t ask whether that will happen to the Round Barn Farm Market. White has heard enough stupid questions.