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

September 10, 1998

Plains Folk: Barns—Bygone but Not Forgotten

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

©1998 Plains Folk

In most any good bookstore you can find coffee-table books devoted to barns. We like barns, I think, because they are monumental anachronisms. They have lost utility in the modern agricultural landscape. The milking stanchions are rusted shut, and it's hard to put big round bales in the loft.

While we revere barns in general, I think we are conceited in our tastes about them. The barns we respect are the ones that fit certain ideals of design and craftsmanship tracing back to some such hearth as Pennsylvania. We see a bank barn with a threshing floor and maybe even a hex on the door, and we get all gooey.

Use of native materials also scores high in our scale of regard for barns. I remember working on the nomination of the Rogler Ranch in Chase County, Kansas, for the National Register of Historic Places, and an important feature in the nomination was the barn. No one could argue the barn was not historic, because the beams were hewn from trees in the nearby Cottonwood River bottom.

Up the road at the new Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, the old Z Bar or Spring Creek Ranch, a key attraction is the massive barn. This is a great barn by both its history and its design, but a large element of its appeal is that it is constructed of good old Flint Hills limestone.

What make these barns great, however, are things not to be found in most parts of the plains—quality timber and building stone. What about the great expanses of the Great Plains without such assets? This country is spangled with barns, too, that have to be met on their own terms. If you grew up on a farm or ranch in the Great Plains, as I did in central Kansas, then I'll bet the barn on your place did not incorporate hewn timbers or native stone.

I'll bet it was more like the many barns I documented last summer while working on a survey of buildings of Bowman County for the State Historical Society of North Dakota. These were all 20th-century barns built after the railroad had arrived. They were constructed of milled lumber and put on foundations of concrete.

Yet they are magnificent in the open landscape, and various in their functions and design. The classic barn in this part of the country had a gambrel roof—what local people call a "hip roof," but that's really something else. A gambrel roof was intended to maximize loft space. An arch roof achieved much the same purpose and is, I think, even more elegant, but arch roofs are less common.

We were particularly impressed with the gambrel-roof barn of a woman named Vivian Davis. She's a native of the area and a retired schoolteacher who taught in military schools all over the world, then inherited the family farm and moved back. She has put that big loft to use by holding barn dances. The greatest public service given by her barn, though, is just standing there. That splendid red barn is the most prominent landmark in the eastern half of a large county.

And then there are the sheep barns, something new to our experience. I'm told that ventilation is quite important in a lambing building, and so the great old sheep barns have distinctive monitor roofs. A monitor roofline has low flanks with roof faces sloping up to a taller central section, where the upper walls rise vertically again and are capped by a narrow gable. Superior ventilation is achieved by windows in this upper part. It also makes sheep barns distinguishable from a distance by their rooflines.

These barns deserve our respect. In the level and rolling and sparsely populated landscapes of the plains, they are like grand cathedrals.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136