Plains Folk

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

November 19, 1998

Plains Folk: Staking a Silo Claim

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

There are two ways to become the World's Foremost Authority on something. The first way is to tackle some major subject, devote your life to it and apply yourself faithfully. The other way is to pick a topic nobody else knows anything about—which is how I claim to be the World's Foremost Authority on wooden silos in the historic landscape of the Great Plains. This really is a pretty important topic, although obscure. Silos are both prominent and significant in the landscape, essential symbols of dairying and cattle feeding. Even among people who notice such things, hardly anyone knows that early in this century, in the heyday of silo construction, most of them were made of wood. Survivors standing today are more likely to be concrete or tile, but they are not representative.

Wooden silos were of several distinct types, one of which was the Wisconsin. A Wisconsin silo consisted of vertical studs on the outside and curved horizontal sheathing nailed inside the studs. Wooden hoops around the outside held the studs in place while the sheathing was nailed to the studs. I've never seen one of these Wisconsin jobs on the plains. Then there was the hoop silo. It consisted of vertical studs, curved horizontal hoops nailed to the studs and vertical sheathing nailed to the hoops. I've never seen one of these on the plains, either. Indeed, both the Wisconsin and the hoop sound to me like jerry-built contraptions doomed to sad fates on plains, if ever they were tried here.

In research mainly on the southern plains, though, I've found two types of wooden silos rather common. One of these is the timber-crib silo. Generally an octagon or decagon, the timber-crib silo was built with the same basic technique as a grain elevator. The walls were built up of 2-inch lumber (2x4s or 2x6s) laid flat, with each layer nailed down into the ones below.

These timber-crib silos took a lot of nails and a heck of a lot of lumber, but they were regular forts, quite stable. I've found a half-dozen or so still standing. I think there would be more of them except that they contained such fine lumber—which could be salvaged for many other uses when the dairy herd was sold off. Although fairly common down south, I don't think the timber-crib silo was much used on the northern plains.

By far the most common wood silo, and the one most commonly found still standing on both the southern and northern plains, was the wood-stave. These often were sold by implement dealers as kits. The buyer got a pile of cypress, white pine, cedar or redwood lumber and long staves 2 inches thick, along with iron rods to encircle the staves and turnbuckles to tighten them. The staves stood vertical, were fitted together tongue-and-groove on their edges, and were squeezed together by the rods and turnbuckles.

The main public document on silo construction in North Dakota is an experiment station bulletin, "The Silo and Its Construction," published in 1912 and written by J.H. Shepperd, agriculturalist and future president of North Dakota Agricultural College, in cooperation with the college dairy specialist and its agricultural engineer.

The authors advise building upright silos of hollow clay tile or hollow concrete blocks, because these materials were best suited to keeping silage up north. They don't think much of pit silos, because of problems with raising heavy silage from the pit and the dangers of gas. (By pit I mean a cylindrical silo dug into the ground, not a trench.) They aren't enthusiastic about wooden silos, either—but farmers were.

Some of the evidence is still out there on the land—and the subject of my next column.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136