Plains Folk

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

November 25, 1998

Plains Folk: Hoping to Preserve the Dreams

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Every time I drive on a particular stretch of North Dakota's Highway 200 I wonder if it will still be there. The old wood-panel silo on the Iverson farm, I mean. From east or west but especially from the east, the descent into the Sheyenne River Valley is sublime here, and somehow the aggregation of white-painted farm buildings on the Iverson farm, there on the west bank of the river, seems native to the place.

Anchoring the farm is the double barn—two barns, one arch-roofed and the other gambrel-roofed, joined together to form a fat T with the stem pointing south. And nestled in the L of the west side of the T is the silo.

The wood-panel silo is a form I have encountered only on the northern plains, and although it's hard, I'll try to explain it. The frame that holds it together is a collection of long steel fittings, long as the silo is tall, with slots in the side of each fitting. After these were erected vertically from the concrete foundation, short (about 20-inch) wood panels were slid down the slots and nestled horizontally between the vertical metal fittings to form the walls. Then, iron rods were run around the whole thing and tightened with turnbuckles. Little grooves ground into the outside edge of the vertical metal frames were designed to keep the rods from sliding up or down.

This type of silo obviously was sold as a kit. The 1912 North Dakota bulletin "The Silo and Its Construction," makes reference to wood-panel silos in its tables but says nothing about them. I think maybe I am the historical discoverer of this vanishing form of silo.

Vanishing, I say, because there used to be one along Highway 10 between Glyndon and Hawley, Minn., but I can't spot it anymore, so it must have been torn down. Larry Iverson says his is a hazard and needs to be demolished. A few days ago, though, I photographed another wood-panel silo built in about 1918 on the Lynde farm north of Glyndon. A few years ago I also saw one standing just south of Herreid, S.D.

Besides the wood-panel jobs, I have found a number of wood-stave silos (constructed of vertical wooden pieces) still standing on the northern plains. A great example is on the Mike Sherwin place in Buchanan, N.D. It stands next to a fine old barn—a red ramp barn measuring about 30 feet by 90 feet sitting on a firm foundation of rubble stone.

The silo, Sherwin says (he's a petroleum geologist who works abroad, but when at home works at the elevator, where I found him), is redwood on a foundation of concrete and fieldstone. Guy wires anchored to the barn and the ground have helped to hold it upright.

I've spotted another wood-stave silo south of Highway 2 near Penn, N.D., but haven't learned anything about it yet. There's another one visible from I-29 on the east side of the interstate and just south of Exit 140 in South Dakota. I suspect there are scores of them up and down the Great Plains that I haven't happened to have run across yet because, although relatively few have survived, the wood-stave silo once was the most common type in the country.

Upright silos, like the barns alongside which they stand, are anachronisms. Few of them are turned to practical use today, and thus I suspect all will be gone in a few years. I'd like to document more of them before they go. If you'd like to let me know of one, I'm in Minard Hall 412C, NDSU, Fargo ND 58105-5075.

These wood silos are important to me, I suppose, because of what they represent—the fragility of dreams on the open plains. I've gotten interested in farm buildings because of the hopes they express—generally hopes of diversified family farming, farms with crops and livestock and futures, things that were supposed to be passed along intact to coming generations.

Maybe we can't preserve the substance of all that, but at least I'd like to preserve the dreams.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136