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

December 23, 1998

Plains Folk: More Silos Take Shape

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

©1997 Plains Folk

The wooden silo business on the northern plains, a subject I started in on weeks ago, has more angles to it than I figured. Besides learning of additional wood-stave silos, and of the hoopless stave silo invented by N.J. Schlachter in Gettysburg, S.D., I also heard from Sandra Freeman of Britton, S.D., about another type.

She sends photos. This is an octagonal structure each side of which is composed of vertical wood staves stretching the full height of the silo. I suspect that the vertical staves are fitted together edge-to-edge, tongue-and-grove, and that the ends are beveled at the corners. The exterior of each of these wood-stave panels, then, is covered with horizontal lap siding.

Atop the silo is a hip roof of wood shakes, and from its apex protrudes a wooden pole or staff, perhaps 10 feet long, use unknown. (I knew a farmer in Kansas who had such a staff atop his silo for a flagpole, but I wonder, could these poles have supported lightning rods?) A gable dormer in one face of the roof has a window through which silage might be blown to fill the thing right to the top.

This type of silo is unlike any I've encountered before. Ms. Freeman says it was built shortly after the turn of the century. She's a photographer who seeks out old farm buildings—someone I'm going to have to meet.

Lester Russell Lauritzen of Centerville, S.D., has sent me an interesting letter and some fine sketches of a silo his father built in the 1930s. This was a "temporary" silo of wood panels that turned out to be semi-permanent.

"After a relatively brief existence as a silo, it was dismantled and converted into a brooder house for baby chicks," Lauritzen says.

The 15-foot-tall panels making up the sides of this temporary silo were made of 1x10 boards standing vertically and held in place by 2x4s nailed on the outside horizontally. These horizontal 2x4s were bolted together in the corners to hold the thing together.

Old Mr. Lauritzen was more ambitious than most in constructing this elaborate temporary silo. The more common recourse was a circle of corn slat, or snow fence, lined with tar paper. Lauritzen remembers filling the temporary silo with corn silage, and says no pictures were taken, but his sketches are elegant.

I'm honored to hear also from Dexter Johnson, a retired NDSU ag engineer who specialized in agricultural buildings. He informs me of what happened to many wood-stave silos in the region: The Osakis Silo Company (Osakis, Minn.) took them down to salvage the redwood or fir lumber.

"My dad would buy the lumber from the silo company and use it for building," Dexter says. He also notes that wood silos continue to be manufactured in recent years. He has a booklet on building silos with fir plywood. In 1988 he learned a company in Sweden, Boxhold Production, still made available a wood silo, and in 1994 he heard of a wood silo manufactured in Canada and offered by Sollenberger Silos of Pennsylvania.

There is another intriguing aspect to the silo business on the northern plains, and that is pit silos—I mean pits straight down into the ground, not trenches. Arlen Foster called to tell me about a pit silo on his grandparents' place near Mitchell, S.D., in the 1930s. It's since become the repository of all sorts of junk and animal carcasses, but pit silos were something distinctive to the plains region—and perhaps the next type I need to investigate.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136