Plains Folk: Chickens, Eggs, and Houses

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

September 3, 1998

Plains Folk: Chickens, Eggs and Houses

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Scanning the Great Plains today we can easily be misled to think that this is a land of wheat and cattle and always has been. No doubt our ancestors who settled the country did expect to make good money from the major commodities, but they also had other ideas. They believed in the ideal of the diversified family farm—the old "cow, sow, and hen" idea. The proof of their belief is there, materially, when you walk about old farmsteads.

Chicken houses, for instance. In the past few years historians of rural women have been pointing out through reference to census materials and diaries how important it was that women kept farm flocks and brought in egg money. I'd like to point to another piece of evidence of the importance of hens—the material and technique spent on chicken houses.

This is something I became aware of through research in my native state of Kansas, especially extension reports of the 1920s and 1930s. To begin with, though, I remember that my grandparents had a substantial chicken house on the farm where I grew up in Barton County. It was a long building with a lot of windows on the long wall facing east. The laying boxes ran the length of a room on this east side from one end to the other. Back of this room was a roosting chamber, and in one corner a granary. On top the chicken house, although I never would have known to call it this at the time, was a semi-monitor roof.

Now getting into those extension reports, I was amazed at all the attention lavished on chickens. You might think this was just one of those extension ideas that maybe the farm folk themselves were dubious about, but no—the photos show that people were just flocking to demonstrations of how to cull the flock, how to make capons, how to kill rats in the chicken house, and so on.

As to housing the flock, the great concerns were hygienic. Ventilation was important, and also the idea arrived in the 1920s that in order to minimize disease—chickens die if you just look at them hard—you should have chicken houses on skids and move them around. I remember one county agent pasted in his report a photo of a smiling woman in an apron next to her portable chicken house with the caption, "It pays to raise poultry on clean ground."

Now I spent the past summer surveying farm buildings in Bowman County, North Dakota, for the state historical society, and I can tell you, around here portability was not a priority. The big problem was keeping a flock alive, and preferably laying, through a long, cold winter. The chicken houses show how they did it. First, build low, exposing as little external wall as possible to the elements. Second, put a bank of windows on the south wall, so as to gather as much solar warmth and light as possible. And third, build tight.

Quite a few of these northern chicken houses were given exteriors of stucco, so as to make them tighter and better insulated. This also made them remarkably attractive buildings.

And distinctive, too, because of their design. The classic chicken house of the northern plains has what is called a saltbox roof, meaning one of the long walls is taller than its opposite, and thus one face of the roof extends longer and lower than the other. The taller wall, with windows, is on the south side.

We did find some chicken houses that did not follow these principles for energy conservation, but they generally were ones built later and wired for electricity.

So there was a time when people made chickens a priority on farms of the plains. I can tell you, though, that in the course of our survey of farm buildings in 1997, in a whole county, we found exactly two chicken houses occupied by flocks.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136