NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

August 27, 1998

Plains Folk: Granaries and Northern Plains Wheat Culture

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

©1998 Plains Folk

We take them for granted, these homely little buildings strewn about our farmsteads and shelterbelts, but they are the architectural signature of wheat farming on the northern plains. I'm talking about granaries.

If you've lived all your life here you may not realize how distinct a signature this is. I spent most of my life in the winter wheat country of the southern plains and then began traveling the northern plains extensively in my work, and granaries were one of the things I noticed. For a variety of reasons having to do both with environment and with the infrastructure of grain marketing, on-farm storage of grain has been historically much more prevalent in the north.

Wheat culture was booming early in this century, when railroads opened so much of the northern plains to settlement, and so among the first buildings erected on new farmsteads were granaries—wooden ones. Generally they were set atop concrete piers (not full foundations) that lifted them 18 inches or so off the ground.

The walls were upright studs covered with horizontal siding. The roofs usually were low gables—occasionally shed roofs in the ruder ones—covered with wood shingles. The roofs generally had no eaves; they cut off flush with the wall.

The typical granary of this early heyday of wheat culture was of boxy dimensions, some 12 by 16 feet. It had a grain compartment in each end. Grain was deposited through square ports high under the gables, or sometimes in the roof. A door in the middle of one of the longer sides provided access to a central interior alley between the compartments where grain was removed.

That's the basic form, but some people went beyond the basic. More ambitious wheat farmers built longer granaries with more compartments and thus more doors for access to them. This also meant the grain had to be put in through the roof.

The wheat boom of the 1940s brought about construction of some even more impressive granaries, of drive-through design. There would be a line of grain compartments along either long wall, rolling doors on each end, and an alley down the middle for trucks.

Most of what I say here is based on research and field work for an architectural survey of Bowman County I worked on for the State Historical Society of North Dakota. The most outstanding granary we found in that survey was one in the north part of the county that fit this 1940s description. It was particularly striking because of its monitor roof.

Most granaries, though, as I say, are much more humble. In fact by the time that outstanding wooden granary was built, almost everyone else had ceased building wooden ones and commenced buying round steel ones. The first of these date from the 1930s. We found several in Bowman County bearing a stenciled legend, "Ever Normal Granary," and a number. This indicates they were used to seal wheat under the New Deal farm program.

Another important fact about granaries is that they are portable, not only the new metal ones but also the old wooden ones. As everybody knows, there are a lot fewer farms today than there were when the country was settled up. And granaries were too useful to just leave them strewn about the abandoned farms. People hauled them home and arranged them around their own yards and shelterbelts, resulting in regular colonies of granaries.

This sort of portable material of history doesn't get much respect, but it ought to. For better or worse, the welfare of our part of the country has been inextricably tied to wheat, and the granaries grouped on our surviving farms are the symbol of it.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136