Plains Folk

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

April 22, 1999

Plains Folk: Buildings with Bales

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

I've never seen anything quite like this. Oh, I've seen some things similar, but nothing quite like the chicken house on the Deutscher farm in North Dakota's Bowman County.

In the first place, it's way too big for a chicken house. Most chicken houses from the days of family farming were 20 feet long at most. This one is about 50 feet long, but it has the telltale semimonitor roof of a chicken house, the banks of south-facing windows to gather heat and light, roosts and nests inside—and even a few hens pecking at table scraps. It's a chicken house, all right.

But why are the walls so thick—sod, perhaps? The curious can't tell by the stucco exterior, but inside plaster has fallen away to show that the walls are laid up of bales. Now, maybe that doesn't mean much to you, but it gets me excited.

Hay bale construction is a historic technique that has been documented seriously in only one part of the plains—the Sandhills of Nebraska, by folklorist Roger Welsh in the 1960s. He documented more than 40 buildings of this type and set down how they were built.

If you're from the farm, and unless you're real young, then you've stacked hay bales, and so you can imagine how walls might be laid up. The walls generally were laid atop a foundation of poured concrete. Then long iron rods were driven in from the top to hold them in place. Windows were framed of boards pegged to the hay with dowels. The window frames were beveled out so as to admit more light through the thick walls. Most hay bale houses were topped with hip roofs and wood shakes.

The exterior walls were finished by wrapping them in chicken wire, held in place by stapling it to wood stakes driven into the bales, and then applying stucco to the chicken wire. The interior walls were finished with lath and plaster.

Although I haven't studied these Nebraska hay bale houses, I've seen several of them in Arthur (Neb.) and gone into a hay bale church in the same town. They are durable, comfortable and altogether suitable for life on the plains.

It's odd that hay bale houses haven't been documented in other plains states. In all the years I lived in Kansas, I never heard of one. I've seen references to ones in South Dakota and Alberta, but no one cites cases.

In the past decade there has been a revival of interest in hay bale construction in the American West. There even are contractors in some localities who specialize in it. No one seems to know much about the historic technique, however.

So now we have the Deutscher chicken house. The builder, I am told by his grandson, Doug Deutscher, was a homesteader named James Svestka. The bales actually are flax straw, not grass hay. Svestka built the chicken house in about 1930—Doug thinks after reading about the technique in a farm magazine.

According to Welsh, the Nebraskans rarely built farm outbuildings of hay bales, only residences. In North Dakota, though, it would make sense to use hay bale insulation to try to keep a flock alive and laying through the winter.

The Deutscher building is fairly sound, but deteriorating. "The sparrows dug holes in it, and the coons ripped up the roof," Doug remarks.

This is the first documented instance of hay bale construction in North Dakota, but there must be many more in this state and other plains states. I hope to find them.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136