Barns arguably are the buildings most symbolic of the United States.When paired with skyscrapers, their only serious rival for thehonor, the two represent opposing faces of the nation. Skyscrapers,of course, stand for technological and commercial might in the

twentieth century. Barns, in contrast, draw us to the past. They are icons forrural life and for everything positive that we have come to associate withthat existence: community spirit, hard work, closeness to nature. The bigbarns with which we are most familiar have been important in this countryfor about two hundred years now and have symbolized American agricul-ture throughout that period. Over the past few decades, however, they have

KANSAS BARNS IN

TIME AND PLACE

2 KANSAS HISTORY

James R. Shortridge is a professor of geography at the University of Kansas, where he received his M.A. andPh.D. degrees. His recent publications include Peopling the Plains: Who Settled Where in Frontier Kansas(1995) and The Taste of American Place: A Reader on Regional and Ethnic Foods (1998). His active researchin material culture led to his interest in and study of Kansas barns.

The author would like to thank the following people for their conversation and other help in thepreparation of this article: Cathy Ambler, Steve Foulke, Dietrich Kastens, Terry Kastens, Martha Hage-dorn-Krass, Dale Nimz, Paul Phillips, Steve Schnell, Terry Shaffer, and Richard Sleezer.

by James R. Shortridge

KANSAS BARNS IN TIME AND PLACE 3

Barns, such as this impressive structure on the J. F. Terrass farm south of Alma in Wabaunsee County, have become icons for rural life and sym-bols of American agriculture.

4 KANSAS HISTORY

acquired additional layers ofmeaning. No one previously hadproduced countless calendars orglossy picture books aboutbarns; no one had employedthem regularly as advertisingbackdrops to sell beer or auto-mobiles. Now, just as they aredisappearing from the actuallandscape, these barns are more visible than ever inour mass media.

Nostalgia, of course, is the explanation for the re-cent wave of barn enthusiasm. It is romanticization ofa time and a way of life that fewer and fewer of us re-member firsthand. The process has become so en-veloping, in fact, that it is now hard to admit that weactually know very little about barns themselves.Their origins are obscure, their varieties uncertain (al-though a few scholars have now pieced together thebasic outlines). More important, we also have largelyforgotten how our grandparents and great-grandpar-ents constructed these buildings, arranged them in-ternally, and used them as a basic functional unit oftheir economy.

The 1999 tour through Kansas of Barn Again!, atraveling exhibition sponsored by the SmithsonianInstitution, is an appropriate time for a reconsidera-tion of the barn. The exhibition’s subtitle, Celebratingan American Icon, refers to the broad sweep of associ-ations that we now make with these structures. Inthis article, however, I will focus more directly on thebarn itself. The aim is mostly contextual, to relate ageneral history of the barn in the United States, to ex-plore the types that came to Kansas, and to discussthe evolution of the structure that took place after thestate was settled. Through this process I hope to pro-vide readers with a guide for their personal explo-rations of these ubiquitous but underappreciated ele-ments of the local landscape. Perhaps, too, my wordswill encourage people to document the history of thebarns in their families or neighborhoods and to createways to preserve and/or find alternate uses for atleast some of these austere but noble buildings.

Despite their recent romanticization, barns areeminently practical structures. They are work places,

farm factories if you will, andthey are constructed with effi-ciency of movement and othercost considerations very much inmind. Popular writings on thesubject downplay these econom-ic aspects and, instead, makemuch of ethnic associations.They speak especially of Dutch,

English, and German barns. Although it is true thatEuropeans brought important building ideas to thiscountry, it would be a gross error to label any morethan perhaps a few dozen existing Kansas barns astruly ethnic. Farming conditions in the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Midwest were vastly dif-ferent from those in eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century Europe. These circumstances drove a host ofadaptations, logically enough, including a series oforiginal and totally American concepts for barn de-sign. Variations existed, of course, but these tended toreflect differences in agricultural systems and not eth-nic cultures. Much of the look of midwestern barns,for example, can be directly attributed to the inven-tions of specific local people. (The significance of ahay carrier developed by Iowan William Louden anda truss system by Ohioan John Shawver, for example,are developed later in this article.) The ideas ofLouden, Shawver, and others were touted extensive-ly in the agricultural magazines and experiment sta-tion bulletins of the time. In Kansas they were adopt-ed as eagerly by Swedish Americans in Scandia andby Russian Mennonites in the Newton area as theywere by older-stock Americans elsewhere in the state.

TRADITIONAL BARN TYPES

When Americans at the turn of the last cen-tury envisioned a barn, they thought im-mediately of a building that served multi-

ple purposes. A barn was a place where a personstabled horses, fed calves, and milked cows. A barnalso contained a threshing floor, one or more gra-naries, a harness room, and perhaps a silo, a work-shop, and a root bin. The largest single area, ofcourse, usually was reserved for hay. Functional in-

KANSAS BARNS IN TIME AND PLACE 5

terconnections in this type of barn between any onesection and another are so obvious that it is difficultto imagine the various farm activities organized inany other fashion. Yet they once were. Before approx-imately 1800, in fact, a barn was quite a different typeof building. A clue to its original function comes fromits etymological kinship with the wordbarley. In England of that time, as wellas in the American colonies, a barn wasa structure associated exclusively withgrain farming. Animals belonged else-where. They either foraged for them-selves out in the weather or each specieswas housed in its own specialized struc-ture: stables for horses, sties for hogs,and byres or shippons for cattle.1

A typical barn from this time was asimple rectangular building: gable-roofed, all on one level, and perhapsforty to sixty feet long. The structure

could be as tall as a two-story house but was alwaysdivided on its long axis into three equal-sized sections(or bays). Large double doors on opposing wallsopened into the middle section. Here wagons wouldenter, bringing sheaves of ripened grain. Workerswould stack these sheaves in one of the side bayswhere they would dry and await threshing. Threshingitself took place in the middle bay. People used handflails to separate grain from chaff and opened the op-posing doors there to create a cross breeze. When thechaff and the grain were tossed together into the air,this air current would blow the lighter chaff away.After separation, the cleaned grain would be stored inbins in the third bay of the barn. The farmer alsowould keep at least some of the grain straw in the sidebays, primarily for use as animal bedding.2

Three-bay threshing barns usually are called Eng-lish barns in popular American writing. This is an ac-curate name in a sense, but similar designs were com-mon elsewhere in Europe as well, and the structurelikely had multiple introductions into this country. AGerman version called the Grundscheier (ground-levelbarn) was regularly built in early Pennsylvania, for

1. R. W. Brunskill, Illustrated Handbook of Vernacu-lar Architecture (London: Faber and Faber, 1971); JohnFraser Hart, The Rural Landscape (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 1998), 193–209.

2. Charles Calkins and Martin Perkins, “The Three-Bay ThreshingBarn,” in Barns of the Midwest, ed. Allen G. Noble and Hubert G. H. Wil-helm (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995), 40–61.

Fig. 1: The upper floor of the Mission–Herring barn near Highlandin Doniphan County projects six feet beyond the basement level onone side. This extension, called a forebay, is the most characteristicfeature of Pennsylvania barns. Such barns originated in the SwissAlps where forebays would have been useful in keeping snow awayfrom stable doors.

Fig. 2. Not all Pennsylvania barns are alike. The forebay on the John Hale barn nearHighland in Doniphan County is narrower than the one on the Mission–Herring barnand is partially supported by the basement’s end walls.

6 KANSAS HISTORY

example, and Pomeranian settlers in Wis-consin constructed another they called theScheune.3

As time went on and farmers began toacquire more money and land, the issue ofthe size and number of outbuildings be-came an important topic of discussion inthe farm newspapers and magazines thathad begun to circulate widely after ap-proximately 1850. Two schools of thoughtemerged that one writer later called theconcentrated plan and the distributiveplan.4 The latter was the traditional solu-tion of erecting a series of small, separatebuildings. Cornell professor Isaac P.Roberts (who clearly favored the othersystem) looked back on the process:

First came the rude house and the log sta-ble. The stable was followed by the modest barn, usually of the regulation size, 30 by 40 feet, with

12-, 14-, or, in rare cases, 16-foot posts. As thearable land increased another barn was built, thena shed, then a wagon-house; followed by a corn-crib, a chicken-house, a pig-pen, and later a sheep-barn, cow-barn, a[nd] hay-barn, all the room in thefirst and second barns being by this time requiredfor grain. . . . The buildings were erected withoutany comprehensive plan as to the farmstead as awhole. This necessitated many fences, gates,yards, and a maze of muddy byways in which thedock and other weeds, discarded implements, andthe flotsam and jetsam of the farm found opportu-nity to grow or to rot. . . . Not infrequently, twelveto fifteen separate structures may be seen on afarm of eighty acres.5

The second, or concentrated, option for a growingfarm meant having a large, multiple-purpose barn.This alternative was feared by some people becauseof its unfamiliarity and by others because of the cata-strophe a single fire there could cause. Still, the effi-ciencies of a big barn gradually made it the norm. Theprocess began modestly. As animal quality improved,for example, it seemed logical to some farmers to con-vert one of the side bays in their old threshing barns

5. Ibid., 251–52; see also John B. Jackson, American Space: The Centen-nial Years, 1865–1876 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972), 23–24.

3. Ibid., 54; Hubert G. H. Wilhelm, “Midwestern Barns and TheirGermanic Connections,” in Noble and Wilhelm, Barns of the Midwest, 67.

4. Isaac P. Roberts, The Farmstead, 5th ed. (New York: Macmillan Co.,1900), 251.

Fig. 3: Interior and exterior features of the Andrew Drummondbarn in Chase County mark it as a transverse-crib design. Insteadof notched logs, most “crib” barns in Kansas were constructed outof boards or, as here, stone.

Fig. 4: The Harsh–Sumpter barn near Argonia in Sumner County has a classicthree-bay design. The large doors lead into the middle, or threshing, bay.

KANSAS BARNS IN TIME AND PLACE 7

into stables. Then, with the ani-mals inside, a need for accessiblehay storage became apparent, soplans were made to add loftsover one or both of the side bays.Another factor driving barnmodification was increasingfarm size. If a family expandedits operation from forty to eightyacres, for example, it often would also consider ex-panding the main barn. Adding a fourth and even afifth bay was possible, as was the less expensive al-ternative of a shed addition to one or both of thegable ends.6

By the time of the Civil War progressive farmersin the fertile lake plains of western New York,in Ohio, and in other northern locations real-

ized that even an expanded version of the three-baythreshing barn would be inadequate for their needs.Most people fell back on the old solution of con-structing auxiliary, specialized buildings. But oneNew York man offered a more radical alternative.Writing in 1866 in the American Agriculturalist, he re-ported that he had modernized his barn by literallyraising it up, constructing a stone stables area under-neath, and adding an outside ramp so as to maintainaccess to the old threshing doors.7

The new design, quickly dubbed a raised or base-ment barn in the periodicals of the time, sparked con-siderable debate. The increased room was appreciat-ed by all as was the easy gravity transfer of hay andgrain from the storage level down to the animals. Pro-ponents also touted the winter warmth of a protectedstable, especially if the barn were constructed on theside of a hill with the doors opening to a sunny south-

ern exposure. Opponents sawthe stable location in differentterms. The basement level, theyargued, inevitably would bedark and unhealthy. Gases fromthe manure would rise and“spoil all the hay and grain in thebarn.”8 Time revealed that thenegative views were overstated.

In fact, the new raised barn grew rapidly in popular-ity and became the most common one built for the re-mainder of the nineteenth century in the developingdairy belt of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

The source of the inspiration behind the firstraised barn in upstate New York is uncertain. Per-haps it was the product of individual genius, but itseems more likely that the farmers there had heard ofsuccessful basement barns elsewhere in the country.The biggest concentration was in southeastern Penn-sylvania, where German and German Swiss settlershad been constructing their versions of this idea sincethe 1730s. That their barns had been noticed else-where (at least after the American Revolution) is clearfrom many sources including a popular 1852 hand-book on rural architecture. There Lewis Allen wrotethat the Pennsylvania barns were the “most thor-ough” to be found in the country, having “a sub-stance and durability in them that is exceedingly sat-isfactory.” Moreover, one of the two detailed barnmodels that he suggested for general use was based“partially on the Pennsylvania plan.”9

The Pennsylvania barn as it had evolved by the1850s was a massive structure. It often measured asmuch as fifty to sixty feet in width and eighty to onehundred feet in length. It stood perhaps fifty feet tall.People knew the barn by several names. Some calledit a Swisser, an accurate tribute to its origins in theAlpine valleys of Canton Graubunden. Otherstermed it a German barn, also historically accurate ina more general sense. Germans, especially southernGermans, had greater need to develop large barns

6. Henry Glassie, “The Variations of Concepts Within Tradition: BarnBuilding in Otsego County, New York,” in Geoscience and Man, vol. 5, Manand Cultural Heritage, ed. Bob F. Perkins (Baton Rouge: Louisiana StateUniversity, Department of Geography and Anthropology, 1974), 177–235.

7. “Improving Old Barns,” American Agriculturalist 25 (June 1866):215; see also Peter Ennals, “Nineteenth Century Barns in Southern On-tario,” Canadian Geographer 16 (Fall 1972): 256–70; William Wyckoff, TheDeveloper’s Frontier: The Making of the Western New York Landscape (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1988); and especially Lowell J. Soike, “Af-fordable Barns for the Midwest: Beginnings,” in Noble and Wilhelm,Barns of the Midwest, 80–87.

8. “Building Barns—Advantages of Barn Cellars,” Iowa Homestead13 (June 17, 1868): 186; see also Soike, “Affordable Barns,” 82–84.

9. Lewis F. Allen, Rural Architecture (New York: C. M. Saxton, Barkerand Co., 1852), 286, 290.

8 KANSAS HISTORY

10. Robert F. Ensminger, The Pennsylvania Barn: Its Origin, Evolution,and Distribution in North America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1992). 11. Ibid., 147–80.

than did Englishmen. Winterswere more severe on the conti-nent, and partly as a result Ger-man agriculture was a grain-livestock amalgam that relied onthe stabling of animals and thespreading of accumulated ma-nure on the grain fields.10

Two other common labelsfor the big Pennsylvania structures were (and are)basement barn and bank barn, the latter a referenceto the almost universal practice of construction on ahillside so as to have ground-level entry for bothfloors. Perhaps the most common name for thisbuilding, however, was a forebay barn. This is a ref-erence to its most distinguishing feature—a can-tilevered extension of the entire second floor somefour to six feet over the entrance to the stables. Thisextension also has been called an overshot or, in Ger-man, a Vorbau or a Vorschuss. Except for their fore-bays, the Pennsylvania barns looked and functionedmuch like their kindred three-bay raised models tothe north. Pennsylvanians often constructed theirwalls of stone or brick, but both barns had simplegable roofs, eave-side entries, and comparable inter-nal divisions. The forebay sections themselves typi-cally contained granaries, while the overhang pro-vided protection for the stables below. Its projectionkept snow away from the doors and gates and madeit easy to throw hay into the barnyard.

Swisser barns were too expensive for frontiers-men to erect, but they proved popular for people ofvaried ethnicities in settled, fertile sites. Their realmextends from the hearth region in southeastern Penn-sylvania southward through the Maryland Piedmontand into most of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Diffu-sion farther to the southeast was inhibited by a lesserneed for large barns in the mild climates of that areaand in the small valley farms established throughoutthe Appalachian Plateau. The barn reappears in theMidwest, however. German colonists, especially con-

servative ones of the Amish,Mennonite, and Brethren faiths,brought the full-forebay modelwith them to Ohio, Indiana, Illi-nois, and beyond.11 Other Penn-sylvania emigrants were not sotrue to the original form. Theybuilt a similar barn, but oftenwithout the forebay, across virtu-

ally all of the emerging corn belt. The mixing of peo-ple and ideas in this region makes it impossible to de-termine which midwestern structures were inspiredby the model of the New York raised barn and whichfrom the older Pennsylvania version. The importantpoint is that a large, two-level barn worked as well onthe cattle-feeding operations of central Illinois as itdid on the dairies of southern Michigan.

I mpressive and efficient as they were, two-levelbuildings were not the only barns popular in theeastern United States on the eve of Kansas settle-

ment. Big basement barns required prosperous, com-mercial farm operations. They made no financialsense on the frontier, in hilly terrain, or anyplace elsewhere people practiced a semisubsistence, mixed-farming system. The design that became dominantunder these latter circumstances has no commonlyaccepted name. Academicians, however, know it as atransverse-crib barn.

As its name suggests, the history of the trans-verse-crib barn begins with a simple log crib, that is,a rectangular pen constructed of notched timbers.Such structures were interlocking and thus strongand easily constructed with only an ax for a tool.Without further modification they could providegood storage for corn (we still speak of corn “cribs”);with gates and other alterations, they could be usedas animal stalls and for other purposes. Cribs alsocould easily be built adjacent to or near one anotherand then joined by a common roof to constitute a sub-stantial barn. Various crib and roof arrangements arepossible, but the most popular geometry had tworows of four to ten cribs (most typically six) flanking

KANSAS BARNS IN TIME AND PLACE 9

a central runway. Hay lofts were built above the cribs,and everything then joined together by a simplegable roof positioned with its ridge line parallel to therunway. This roof orientation (transverse to the indi-vidual cribs) maximized the vertical space over therunway and thereby made it easier to unload loosehay from wagons into the lofts.12

Recent research suggests that the roots of thetransverse-crib design are in the same Pennsylvaniasoil that produced the forebay barn, but the crib barnachieved full development in the Appalachian val-leys of eastern Tennessee about 1790. From there itexpanded throughout the Upland South and beyond.Versatility was key to its success, including ease ofexpansion. Either extra cribs could be added or, morecommonly, sheds built along one or both sides. Thedesign also could be executed with sawn lumber orstone as easily as with logs, making it suitable forconstruction in grassland areas such as Kansas.13 Thiscrib barn looked completely different from the com-parable outbuildings found in the northern states. Itwas smaller and lacked a basement level. It also hadits principal doors on the gable ends instead of theeave sides.

BARNS IN EARLY KANSAS

All four of the tradi-tional barn typescommon in the east-

ern United States came intoKansas soon after the territo-ry was opened for settle-ment in 1854. Of these, thePennsylvania forebay de-signs were by far the fewestin number. Robert Ens-minger, whose longtime re-search has made this barntype the best understood inthe country, has mappedscattered occurrences of

these structures in Iowa, Nebraska, and northernMissouri. From this pattern he has speculated thatthey also are likely to be found in northeastern andextreme northern Kansas.14 Ensminger’s speculationhas been borne out in Doniphan County by the onlysystematic barn survey ever done in Kansas. There,among the sixteen bank barns studied and success-fully nominated for the National Register of HistoricPlaces, are three with forebays.

The oldest two of the Pennsylvania barns inDoniphan County, the Mission/Herring barn of 1860and the John Hale barn of about 1881, possess all theclassic features (Figs. 1, 2). They have gable roofs;ramps leading up to central, eave-side doors; south-facing stables; and solid, post-and-beam framing tim-bers. The stable walls are stone, while the upper levelis clad with vertical boards. Both barns are fairlylarge for their time as well, the Mission/Herring onemeasuring forty-four-by-thirty-six feet and the Halebarn forty-eight-by-thirty-two feet. Each forebay isslightly different, however. The six-foot deep one onthe Mission/Herring barn is unsupported across itsentire length except for four small posts that proba-bly were later additions. This pure cantilever designreflects back to the log origins of this barn type. Italso gives the barn an asymmetrical profile on its12. Fred B. Kniffen, “Folk Housing: Key to Diffusion,” Annals of the

Association of American Geographers 55 (December 1965): 563–65; Terry G.Jordan-Bychkov, “Transverse-Crib Barns, the Upland South, and Penn-sylvania Extended,” Material Culture 30 (Summer 1998): 5–31.

13. Jordan-Bychkov, “Transverse-Crib Barns,” 20–26. 14. Ensminger, The Pennsylvania Barn, 148, 175–78.

Fig. 5: The Abraham Eitzen family near Hillsboro in Marion County decided to retain its originalthree-bay threshing barn instead of replacing it with a larger structure. The family added storage andstables space as needed with a series of smaller buildings. The photograph was taken in 1904.

10 KANSAS HISTORY

Do forebay barns exist in Kansas outside ofDoniphan County? Although I have no concrete evi-dence on the subject, I am confident the answer is yes.Given that natives of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and theother core states for this barn type were the most im-portant suppliers of immigrants to Kansas, it wouldbe most unlikely if none of them brought along theirfamiliar conception of how a barn should look. Peo-ple from these states went west to every Kansas coun-ty in sizable numbers, but one of the best places toseek forebay barns would be in the extreme north-eastern section of the state. People settled there rela-tively early and therefore would have had more timethan others to acquire the money for a large barn bythe 1870s, the decade when newer barn designs beganto be promoted heavily in agricultural periodicals.16

Dickinson County would be a second good hunt-ing ground for forebay barns. Agents of the KansasPacific Railroad specifically targeted ethnic Germansfrom southeastern Pennsylvania as buyers for theportion of their land grant that extended from the

16. James R. Shortridge, Peopling the Plains: Who Settled Where in Fron-tier Kansas (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).

gable end, as the rear slope of the roof continues un-broken over the forebay. The newer Hale barn, incontrast, has what is known as a closed forebay. Inthis design, developed in Pennsylvania about 1790,both of the basement end walls extend under theforebay. This gives extra support and, coincidentally,produces a symmetrical facade for the gable end. Thebuilder of the Mission/Herring barn is unknown. Itbelonged to the Iowa, Sac, and Fox Presbyterian Mis-sion before being sold in 1868 to Benjamin Herring.Hale was a native of Sandusky, Ohio, near a majorconcentration of similarly designed barns.

The third Pennsylvania forebay barn in DoniphanCounty dates to 1890. It lacks several of the tradition-al elements. The size is relatively small (thirty-by-nineteen feet), it has no large doorway on the upperlevel, and it contains a large T-addition on its northside. Its gable facade is symmetrical except that thewalls do not extend under the forebay. The forebay it-self is supported by two posts instead of the endwalls. The original owner, John Stein, was the son ofa German immigrant.15

15. For details on the Mission–Herring, Hale, and Stein barns, see“Nomination Forms,” National Register files, Cultural Resources Divi-sion, Kansas State Historical Society.

Fig. 6: Basement barns in relatively flat Kansas often required theconstruction of a ramp to reach the upper level. The John Engelkebarn in Shawnee County, photographed here in 1900, provides agood example. Digging a well inside a barn was not commonlydone; adding a roof-top windmill for one was rarer still.

Fig. 7: The hilly terrain of Doniphan County is well suited to theconstruction of basement barns. The one erected by John Long nearHighland in 1886 is typical. By building into a south-facing slopehe was able to have ground-level access for both the main floor andthe stables. Note the beautifully designed louvered vents.

KANSAS BARNS IN TIME AND PLACE 11

The relative importance of thisgroup fell off somewhat in sec-tions of Kansas occupied afterthe Civil War because such areasattracted people from a muchwider range of sources than inthe 1850s. Still, upper southern-ers remained important contrib-utors, especially near the border

with Indian Territory. They made up more than 30percent of the immigrants across the entire southerntier of counties and extended this presence north-ward into Elk County in the Chautauqua Hills, ButlerCounty in the Flint Hills, and all of southwesternKansas as far north as Greeley and Scott Counties.19

The transverse-crib barn is a versatile structure,but it originated to fill the needs of a small-scale,semisubsistence economy. Conditions conducive tothis lifestyle in Kansas, both physically and withinthe area of important southern settlement, are bestmet in the relatively infertile, sandstone soils of theChautauqua Hills. Crib barns, therefore, should reachtheir highest relative frequencies in the “KansasOzarks” of Chautauqua, Elk, and the western sec-tions of Montgomery, Wilson, and Woodson Coun-ties. Portions of Atchison, Doniphan, Jefferson, andLeavenworth Counties, where tributaries of the near-by Kansas and Missouri Rivers have eroded deeplyinto the upland surface, also are likely locales forthese barns.

The only documentation available to test the hy-pothesized linkage between crib barns and southern-ers in Kansas is an interesting set of pen-and-inkdrawings of barns and mines in Crawford County byAbraham Walkowitz. Walkowitz was a New Yorkartist who spent the summer of 1945 near Girard as aguest of publisher Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. Hissketches are small and unlabeled, and he deliberatelyignored the newer barns in the area, preferring in-stead what Haldeman-Julius called “old, rheumatic,leaning cripples.”20 Taking these things into account,

Abilene area westward throughparts of Ellsworth, Lincoln, Ot-tawa, Russell, and Saline Coun-ties. These officials were success-ful in attracting some fifteen totwenty thousand immigrants.Smaller contingents of GermanAmericans from this Pennsylva-nia heartland of forebay barnscame to areas around Hesston (Harvey County), Nor-wich (Kingman County), Osborne (Osborne County),Peabody (Marion County), and Yoder (Reno County).Sections of Kansas known for their emigrants direct-ly from Germany would be less likely places to searchfor Pennsylvania barns. Although the design’s rootsare in Europe, its full form developed in this country.17

Of the three remaining traditional barn types,the distribution of the transverse-crib formshould be the easiest to predict. In a recent

study, geographer Terry Jordan-Bychkov has arguedthat this design not only originated in the easternportion of the Upland South (eastern Tennessee) butthat it also is “diagnostic” of the spread of uppersoutherners westward from this hearth. His own fieldwork shows the barn type to be dominant in manycounties of Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri,Oklahoma, and Texas.18 It logically should be inKansas as well, and even casual inspection showsthat it is both widespread and numerous (Fig. 3).

In the absence of any formal surveys, the best ap-proximation available for the density of crib barns issettlement history. In 1865 upper southerners, princi-pally from Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee, con-stituted more than 30 percent of the adult populationthroughout the first two tiers of counties west fromMissouri. They actually were the majority group closeto the border from Doniphan County south to FortScott, as well as in Jefferson County and in MorrisCounty along the Missouri-dominated Santa Fe Trail.

17. Ibid., 94–104, 125–28. If readers know of any Pennsylvania fore-bay barns outside of the three in Doniphan County the author would ap-preciate hearing about them.

18. Jordan-Bychkov, “Transverse-Crib Barns,” 12, 16–19, 24–26.

19. Shortridge, Peopling the Plains, 15–21, 47– 58, 76–92, 145–63.20. Barns and Coal Mines Around Girard, Kansas (Girard, Kans.: Halde-

man-Julius Publications, 1947).

12 KANSAS HISTORY

Walkowitz’s sketches still maybe representative of the older,pre-1900 local barn landscape. Atany rate, the location of the maindoorway is unclear on thirty-four of the barn sketches. Of theothers, twenty-three have theirmajor openings on the gable endand only three have central,eave-side entries. The ratio of gable to eave openingsis thus overwhelming, at nearly eight to one. Even ifnot all of these gable-opening barns have crib origins,the numbers are still strongly supportive of the gen-eral cultural thesis. Nearly all of the gable-openingstructures also had one or more sheds attached.

Moving from transverse-crib buildings to themodified versions of the old three-bay threshingbarns that diffused from New England into Kansasand the rest of the Midwest, it is more difficult to pre-dict a distribution pattern. To some extent it shouldbe opposite that of the crib barn. But since the three-bay plan produces a small barn, many of them weredestroyed to make way for bigger designs once farm-ers began to achieve initial prosperity. It was proba-bly old threshing barns, in fact, that J. D. Walters ofthe Kansas State Agricultural College had in mindwhen he lambasted traditional rural architecture as apreamble to the promotion of his own ideas. In 1891,according to Professor Walters, “the average farmbarn of the West is the same rough-built, cheerlessand inconvenient shed which it was in the days offlails and scythes, back in the woods of New Englandor Ohio.”21

Three-bay barns are dominant in the sketches offarmsteads made for the earliest plat atlases ofKansas counties, those done before about 1880. Theysurvived mostly on smaller farms during the wave ofbig-barn construction that came to eastern and cen-tral Kansas during the prosperous 1880s and to otherplaces where stubborn individuals elected to staywith the tried-and-true building system of a series of

smaller, specialized structuresaround an original three-baybarn (Figs. 4, 5). A Mr. Wheelerof Atchison County sided withthis philosophy in a rejoinder toProfessor Walters. A system ofmultiple barns was less expen-sive to erect, he said, and it low-ered the danger of a major fire.

He also pointed out the difficulty of finding suitableterrain for a bank barn in parts of Kansas, as well asadequate building stone for the basement level.22

The last of the four traditional eastern barns toreach nineteenth-century Kansas, the raisedthree-bay barn, became the one most favored

by experts of the time. Professor Walters, for exam-ple, called its advantages “manifold and manifest,”especially if a hillside site were available. He recom-mended a gentle southeastern slope and argued thatthe barn would work better in Kansas than it had instates farther east. Problems reported with dampnessand disease in the stable level should not be a localworry. Because of the state’s “dry climate,” he con-cluded, a basement design “is preferable to anyother.”23

As big and expensive structures designed formixed farming (Professor Walters recommended aplan thirty-eight-by-seventy-two feet for an 80-acrefarm and a forty-four-by-eighty-eight feet plan for a160-acre farm), basement barns logically would havebeen built in greatest numbers where a prosperous,corn-belt economy was possible.24 In Kansas thismeant counties east of the Flint Hills and those alongthe northern border of the state west to the vicinity ofSmith Center (Figs. 6, 7). The extremely rich farmlandfound southward from Abilene and Salina toHutchinson and Newton also would be a good placeto expect raised barns, although it is too flat there toerect many of the bank variety.25

21. J. D. Walters, “The Barn,” in Kansas State Board of Agriculture,Quarterly Report, 11 (Topeka: Kansas Publishing House, March 1891), pt.2, 56.

22. Ibid., 61.23. Ibid., 57.24. Ibid.25. J. A. Hodges, F. F. Elliott, and W. E. Grimes, Types of Farming in

Kansas, Kansas State Agricultural College Agricultural Experiment Sta-tion Bulletin 251 (Topeka: Kansas State Printing Plant, 1930).

KANSAS BARNS IN TIME AND PLACE 13

Understanding barns in early Kansas is morecomplicated than just tracing the paths of the foureastern designs into the state. Terrain and the avail-ability of building stone imposed limitations on thedistribution of bank barns, and similar forces affectedother decisions as well. Most choices had to do withsimple issues of isolation and cost. In eastern Kansaslumber was available from local sources almost fromthe outset. Allen County had seven sawmills in 1860,for example, Jefferson County eight, and DoniphanCounty twelve. Even Wabaunsee County in the FlintHills had six, courtesy of its Kaw valley lowland.Such abundance did not hold farther west. Railroadscould bring in supplies, of course, but these were ex-pensive, especially if one’s farm was a distance fromthe tracks.26

Solid information on the finances of earlyKansans is unavailable, but it is fair to say that moneywas scarce for the majority of farm families. Thesepeople often possessed basic carpentry and masonryskills, however, and cast about their new local envi-ronment for possible inexpensive building materials.Sod barns were built by the hundreds or perhapseven thousands. They did not get the attention ac-

corded to houses constructedof the same material, however,and so are not part of our stan-dard western lore. Actually, agiven sod building oftenwould serve first a humanclientele and then, after a fewyears, as a home for horses andmilk cows.27 No remaining sodbarns have been located in thestate, but one example of avariation on the sod themedoes exit. This is an adobestructure erected in 1876 byPeter and Anna Loewen, newlyarrived Mennonite settlers inMarion County. As on otherfarmsteads in the area, the

Loewen barn was attached to the family house andhad a simple rectangular plan. It was forty feet long,thirty feet wide, and divided internally into the fa-miliar three sections. The Loewens replaced this barnlater in the century with a detached structure, but theoriginal was reconstructed shortly after the housewas moved to Hillsboro in 1958. The combined build-ing now serves as a local museum.28

Stone as a building material has a much more en-during legacy than either sod or adobe. It came intowide use in two of the state’s most distinctive uplandareas: the Flint Hills and the post rock country (orBlue Hills) that extends along a northeast-to-south-west diagonal from Republic through HodgemanCounties. In contrast, little stone construction existson the High Plains. Bedrock there is generally buriedbeneath deep layers of soil and other alluvial materi-als. Also, imported lumber was much more commonand affordable by the time that region was fully set-tled after 1900. Stone construction began in both theFlint and Blue Hills in the 1870s. Good quality stone

27. Everett Dick, The Sod-House Frontier, 1854–1890 (Lincoln:Johnsen Publishing Co., 1954), 116; see also Roger L. Welsch, Sod Walls: TheStory of the Nebraska Sod House (Broken Bow, Nebr.: Purcells, 1968).

28. Greg Schultz, “Barns and Cultural Change in Central Kansas”(master’s thesis, School of Architecture and Urban Design, University ofKansas, 1983), 30–31; “Pioneer Adobe House Museum” brochure (n.p.,n.d.).

26. Manufactures of the United States in 1860 Compiled from the OriginalReturns of the Eighth Census (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Of-fice, 1865), 164–66.

Fig. 8: The Big John barn, a huge two-level building constructed from local limestone, is located nearCouncil Grove in Morris County. Its name comes from Big John Creek, but the original owner prob-ably was Seth Hays, one of the earliest settlers in Council Grove.

outcropped in these locales, and the post rock(Greenhorn Limestone) was especially easy to quarry,even with ordinary tools. Word of the stone’s advan-tages spread, and before long it seemed that “everyman was a stonemason.”29

A few misconceptions exist about stone construc-tion. It was done mostly for practicality, not for styleor warmth, and offered a way to gainprotection from prairie fires that fre-quently destroyed wooden buildingsat that time. The degree of dominanceof stone buildings also is poorly un-derstood. Their frequency in the FlintHills is often overstated simply be-cause stone structures are more pho-togenic than the wooden ones we areaccustomed to seeing elsewhere. Theopposite is perhaps true in the BlueHills. There public clamor over the

unique stone fence posts has longdrawn attention away from theeven more common use of thismaterial for barns and houses.30

Several of the Flint Hills barns areespecially impressive structuresand are on the National Register ofHistoric Places. These include theseventy-six-foot-long Big Johnbarn (Fig. 8) one mile east ofCouncil Grove in Morris County(1871–1872), the George Yountbarn north of Winfield in CowleyCounty (1881), and the mammothbank barn on the Spring HillRanch north of Strong City inChase County (1881).

Another notable area of stonebarn construction exists at thewestern edge of the Blue Hillswhere the Volga German settlers

in Ellis, Rush, and adjacent counties used both thepost rock and the thicker Fort Hays Limestone tofashion many buildings. Their churches are famous,of course, but many houses and barns also were builtbetween the 1870s and the 1930s. The reasons for

14 KANSAS HISTORY

29. Quote in Grace Muilenburg and AdaSwineford, Land of the Post Rock: Its Origins, History,and People (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,1975), 61; David A. Grisafe, Kansas Building Stone,Mineral Resources Series 4 (Lawrence: Kansas Geo-logical Survey, 1976).

30. Muilenburg and Swineford, Land of the Post Rock, 58.

Fig. 9: The William Thomas barn once stood near Woodston in Rooks County. It towered sixty-four feet and had a haymow that could hold five hundred tons of fodder.

Fig. 10: A lower-level floor plan typical of many nineteenth-century basement barns. Stallsin the middle two rows are designed for heifers, and thus are served by a relatively narrowalley. Note the interior silo, a common feature in barns at the time.

choosing stone were the same aselsewhere, only augmented hereby a greater sense of self-suffi-ciency borne of cultural isola-tion.31 As with stone barns inother parts of the state, theirheights tend to be lower thanthose of neighboring woodenbarns because of the difficulty ofhoisting heavy stone blocks.

The climate variations that make western andeastern Kansas such different worlds in somany ways affect barn design as well. Be-

tween 1870 and 1886 the High Plains was primarily aland of range cattle. People there believed that winterfeeding was unnecessary and, therefore, so werebarns. This philosophy changed after a series of se-vere blizzards between 1884 and 1887 killed perhaps40 percent of the region’s cattle. Ranchers reduced thesize of their holdings, installed fences, and erectedbarns and other shelters.32 One might expect at firstthat the barns of these reformed cattlemen would behuge, sizes comparable with their herd numbers.This is not the case. Even today many of the local res-idents agree that, on average, High Plains barns aresmaller than those in the eastern part of the state.

The paradox between large ranches and smallbarns can be explained by the weather. Winter foragedefinitely is needed on the Plains, whether it beprairie hay, alfalfa, cane sorghum, or something else.Such feed does not have to be stored inside in thisphysical environment, however, since humidity andprecipitation levels are low enough to minimize thedanger of spoilage. Like ranchers across the inter-montane West, western Kansans opted to stack mostof their fodder in the fields.33 They created distinctiveround hayricks or sometimes ones shaped like loaves

of bread with a variety of home-made or purchased stackingequipment. It was cheaper to doso for two major reasons. Barnconstruction costs thus werelowered and, since the haystackscould be positioned closer to thecattle than any single buildingcould be, so was the cost of win-

ter feeding. Some hay was shipped to the familybarn, to be sure, but only a small percentage of thecrop. Barn hay was used for milk cows, for ridinghorses, and also for emergency situations where mudor snow made it impossible to access the distantstacks. Because such emergencies were irregular bynature, the fodder in a typical western Kansas barnsometimes was several years old. (If readers are won-dering why they do not see haystacks in westernKansas today, the answer is that they have been ren-dered obsolete by a labor-saving machine that allowsone person to create a series of round, thousand-pound bales that repel the elements better than did awell-made stack.)

Two other special barn characteristics of westernKansas deserve mention. One is a contrast betweenthe extreme northern and southern counties there,with southwestern Kansas having mild enough win-ters so that some ranchers have continued to practiceyear-round grazing. They, therefore, have opted forfewer and smaller barns. The other point is an obvi-ous contrast between the generality of smaller barnsin the west and the presence there of occasional gi-gantic structures. The big barns of the High Plains areall post-1900 in construction and fall into one of twocategories. Some were built to house draft horsesneeded for working large wheat farms. An example isthe famous William Thomas barn that long stoodnear Woodston in Rooks County and was being re-stored through statewide fund raising when itburned in the early 1990s (Fig. 9). Thomas owned1,760 acres in 1910, the year his one-hundred-by-sixty-four-foot barn was completed. Other big barnswere designed as show buildings. They can be repre-sented by one constructed in 1936 for Foster Farmsnear Gem in Thomas County. Its main floor (measur-

31. Albert J. Peterson, “German–Russian Colonization in WesternKansas: A Settlement Geography” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Geographyand Anthropology, Louisiana State University, 1970).

32. Don L. Good, “The Beef Cattle Industry,” in The Rise of the WheatState: A History of Kansas Agriculture, 1861–1986, ed. George E. Ham andRobin Higham (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1987), 73-75; H. Craig Miner, West of Wichita: Settling the High Plains of Kansas,1865–1890 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986), 177.

33. James A. Young, “Hay Making: The Mechanical Revolution onthe Western Range,” Western Historical Quarterly 14 (July 1983): 311–26.

KANSAS BARNS IN TIME AND PLACE 15

ing 114 feet by 66 feet) was oncehome to prize Herefords andShorthorns. Later the Cooperfamily donated it to the PrairieMuseum of Art and History inColby, where it now houses dis-plays about agricultural history.34

The Flint Hills, the state’smost famous cattle country, alsohas a unique barn heritage. Whereas High Plainsranchers before the modern age of feedlots and irri-gation concentrated on the production of young ani-mals to sell to corn-belt farmers for fattening, theircounterparts in the Flint Hills raised very few calves.Life in places such as Admire, Cassoday, and Madi-son revolved around a tradition of transient cattle,animals shipped into the area in the spring for sum-mer grazing on lush bluestem grasses. They wouldbe shipped out and sold in the fall. This arrangementmeant that few animals were left in the region duringthe winter and thus a lesser need for barns than inany other part of the state. Some hay was required, ofcourse, principally for horses and for the purebredcattle kept to improve herd quality. This was some-times stored in stacks, even though spoilage ratescould be substantial in this climate. Another solutionwas to erect buildings with no walls, or hay sheds.These were cheap and effective shelters.35

One version of the hay shed found in south-cen-tral Kansas features a roof that can be raised and low-ered to maximize protection for a given amount ofhay. This type is known to scholars as a hay barrackand to local ranchers as a hay roof. It has a long his-tory in Europe and elsewhere but has almost com-pletely disappeared everywhere except in Kansas.Barracks survive here because they are well-suited toranching on the tallgrass prairie. Folklorist Jim Hoyhas discovered more than sixty local examples of hay

roofs. Most of them occur inSedgwick County where HenryNicks had the inspiration to erectthe first one around 1927. Nicksbuilt between forty and fifty hayroofs, and other people copiedthe design, including several liv-ing in the heart of the Flint Hills.Owners praise their low con-

struction costs, the way open air cures the hay, andthe breeze they get while working in one as opposedto an enclosed barn loft.36

PERFECTING THE PRODUCT

Charles Sehon, a carpenter from West Virginiawho came to Kansas in 1884, is known tohave built at least six barns in Douglas Coun-

ty between 1885 and 1905. Elements of his individualstyle are visible to anyone who takes the time to ex-amine the craftsmanship, but these points of similar-ity are overwhelmed by a fundamental change thatoccurred in his designs in midcareer, between 1890and 1901. Sehon’s first barn, in 1885, was a small onethat followed the classic three-bay threshing format.Another, built for a bigger landowner in 1890, was anequally classic raised three-bay barn. Both had eave-side openings and center passageways from whichhay could be placed in the lofts.

Eleven years elapsed before Sehon built anotherbarn. When he resumed activity in 1901, and with an-other barn in 1903, the traditional formats had beenscuttled. Both new structures still had gable roofs andvertical board siding, but these were about the onlyreminders of the old. One obvious change was in theentry, which shifted locations from the eave side tothe gable end. This, of course, signaled a different in-terior floor plan. Another important break with thepast involved animal location. Even though both ofthe new barns were large, neither had a basement; thestables were now in sheds attached to the eave sides.

16 KANSAS HISTORY

34. Martha Knudsen, Kansas Barns (Newton, Kans., 1993), 82–83,100–1.

35. Walter M. Kollmorgen and David S. Simonett, “Grazing Opera-tions in the Flint Hills–Bluestem Pastures of Chase County, Kansas,” An-nals of the Association of American Geographers 55 (June 1965): 260–90; JimHoy and Tom Isern, Plains Folk: A Commonplace of the Great Plains (Nor-man: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 83–86; Charles L. Wood, TheKansas Beef Industry (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1980), 9.

36. James Hoy, “The Hay Barrack in Kansas,” Mid-America Folklore 18(Fall 1990): 116–29.

Finally, an observer’s eye would be drawn to a smalltriangular extension of each roof over a lengthenedridgepole and suspended metal track. Farther belowthese roof extensions (people called them hay bon-nets or hay hoods) was a large door that gave directaccess to the hay loft but opened on the outside intonothing but air.37 What was going on?

If our hypothetical observer were to travel be-yond Lecompton Township, he or she would findthat Sehon’s barns of 1901 and 1903 were typical ofthe time rather than some individ-ual flight of fancy. If anythingSehon was a little conservative, forthe gable roofs he continued toerect were not the type being builtby most of his contemporaries. An-other survey of Kansas barns fromthis period, Greg Schultz’s invento-ry of twenty-three German- andSwedish American structures, doc-uments this process well.38 The new

roof was a two-pitch de-sign called a gambrel, andit came on the regionalscene nearly simultane-ously with the hay hood,the new interior layout,and the decline of base-ment designs. Things werechanging fast on manyfronts, and the correspon-dence of the various newelements in time suggeststhat they all might well beinterrelated.

Before delving intothe hows and whys of thenew barn design, it is use-ful for Kansans to realize

that the gap in Charles Sehon’s construction careerduring the 1890s is typical for the state. Local resi-dents, especially those on the High Plains, enduredthe worst drought in Kansas history between 1888and 1901. When one adds in a national business panicin 1893, it is little wonder that barn construction wasminimal. Tragic as it was at the time, this gap in the1890s is now useful to a modern observer. Any bigbarn in the state with a gable roof and no hay bonnet

KANSAS BARNS IN TIME AND PLACE 17

37. Adam Waits, “Midwest Barn Building,1885–1905: A Case Study” (paper, Departmentof Geography, University of Kansas, 1985). Acopy is available at Watkins Community Muse-um of History, Lawrence, Kans.

38. Schultz, “Barns and Cultural Change,”tables between 8–9.

Fig. 11: A simplified floor plan typical of many gable-entry barns built in Kansas after 1900. In this par-ticular schema, the cows face away from the center alley. Whether it was better to “head in” or “head out”was widely debated, with most textbooks saying it was a matter of personal preference. Heading out madefor the easier removal of manure.

Fig. 12: A “western” barn of unknown ownership in Sedgwick County. The presence of loft-level windows is unusual, as are the star decorations.

probably was built before 1890, most likely during orjust after one of the boom periods of 1868–1872,1877–1879, and 1884–1887. The same goes for bankbarns and for three-bay threshing designs. On theother hand, if one sees a gable-entry barn accompa-nied by a hay bonnet, it is a reasonable guess that thestructure dates between 1901 and 1930. The same istrue for gambrel-roofed barns. The 1930 end-date re-lates to the Great Depression, of course. This disaster,too, caused a virtual suspension of construction, andsince the economic crisis continued nearly until thetime of building material shortages during WorldWar II, such inactivity extended through 1945. Forthe big barns, 1930 turned out to be nearly the ab-

solute end for their construction because few peopleafter the war saw a need to erect any more of them.

To return now to the barns themselves, hay wasthe most important force behind the changes that hadtaken place in their appearance by the turn of thetwentieth century. More precisely it was the combi-nation of a greatly increased need for hay on the ever-larger farms of the Midwest plus a series of techno-logical improvements that allowed families to put upmuch greater volumes of this basic fodder than any-one before had thought possible. The transition fromold to new began in the 1830s when horse-drawnmowing machines first started to replace handscythes in the fields. Better rakes soon followed, andby the time of the Civil War the greatest obstacle toincreased hay production was in the barn itself. Thework of pitching fodder up from wagons into barnlofts was hard, slow, and hot. Dodging roof supportbeams while moving hay to far corners was no easymatter either.39

A mechanized way to lift hay into lofts first ap-peared in the 1860s. An iron fork was attached to arope-and-pulley system that, when pulled by a horseor mule, could raise and lower sizable clumps of hay.This left only the problem of moving the accumulat-ed haycocks from the center section of the barn to itsends. The solution here—a track system suspendedfrom the barn’s ridgepole—launched its inventor ona profitable career. He was William Louden of Fair-field, Iowa, and the date was 1867.40

Louden’s invention, the hay carrier, was impor-tant in its own right, but its implications for barn de-sign were absolutely profound. With a convenientway to distribute hay in lofts, why not have higherbarns? Why not also make them longer? Even moreexciting, why waste potential loft space by retaininga central passage that was open all the way to therafters? This alley now could be boarded across at theloft level, for nothing prevented loading hay fromoutside the barn. All that was required was a new

18 KANSAS HISTORY

39. R. Douglas Hurt, American Farm Tools: From Hand-Power to Steam-Power (Manhattan, Kans.: Sunflower University Press, 1982), 84–91.

40. Ibid., 92–94; Soike, “Affordable Barns,” 87–91; “WilliamLouden,” Agricultural Engineering 2 (April 1921): 89.

Fig. 13: A hay barn designed and sold by the Gordon Van-Tine Com-pany of Davenport, Iowa, in its 1923 catalog. Cattle or other live-stock were to be housed along the eave sides of the barn, with the en-tire central bay reserved for hay. A model fifty-six feet long sold for$1,222 and would hold thirty-nine tons of loose hay.

door cut high on the building’sgable end and an extension ofthe hay carrier far enough be-yond the wall that the hayforkcould be lowered over wagonsthat would be drawn up along-side the barn wall. The most vis-ible evidence of all these alter-ations to a passerby, of course, was the protrudingpiece of roofing that protected the end of the carrier.Crowning one or both gable peaks, these modest“bonnets” or “hoods” clearly identified their ownersas progressive farmers.

The widespread adoption of the hay carrier led toreconsiderations of barn design far more extensivethan just hay doors and boarded-across alleys. Sub-consciously, almost all traditional barns had been de-signed with heights, lengths, and widths suited to thehand-pitching of hay. Now, however, since this fod-der could be lifted easily to far greater heights, tallerlofts were logical. Longer barns made sense, too, forthe carrier could be extended down the middle of aloft for seventy feet or farther without a problem.Moreover, if the loft in the redesigned structure weresimultaneously narrowed, the gain in efficiencywould be even greater, for the distance workers need-ed to pitch from carrier to wall would be minimized.Such modifications were the talk of agricultural peri-odicals in the 1870s and 1880s, and many establishedfarmers in the eastern Midwest put them into prac-tice in that latter decade.41

Once people began thinking about taller, narrow-er lofts, it was natural also to reconsider other tradi-tional aspects of barn design. Time and money spentdigging into hillsides and laying expensive stonewalls for basement stables might be wasted, they rea-soned. Everything could just go vertical instead, andthe livestock could be kept at ground level, perhapsin sheds attached to the main barn core. Ramps, too,might be unneeded items.

Another important part of the reconceptualiza-tion of the barn involved the internal arrangement of

stalls and alleys. The long-stand-ing pattern had been determinedby the eave-side location ofmajor doorways, both for thethreshing bay on the main floorand for the stables in the base-ment. In a typical basementarrangement this meant a series

of short aisles and four or more rows of animal stalls,as shown in a late example advocated for Kansasfarmers (Fig. 10).42 Such short aisles always had beeninefficient for feeding and cleaning; they would be-come even more so if the barn were narrowed andlengthened.

Why not simply shift the stalls and alleysninety degrees? A ground-level barncould be accessed from the gable side as

easily as any other, and the widths of thirty-two tothirty-eight feet being touted as ideal for the opera-tion of hay carriers would work wonderfully for ani-mals as well. The new arrangement usually focusedon a central driveway some eight-to-ten feet widethat extended from one gable-end door to the other(Fig. 11). This served as a feed alley for two rows ofstalls, one on each side of the drive. These stalls andtheir accompanying feed troughs would be approxi-mately nine feet deep if they were intended for hors-es, and somewhat shorter for cattle. Beyond the stallsand adjacent to the barn walls on either side wouldbe paired alleys for manure removal. Each of thesetypically would measure five feet across. The linearorientation of the whole arrangement made feedingand cleaning much easier than they had been before.One pass with a feed cart and two with a manurescoop and you were done.43

Any Kansas farmers who had strong southernroots and who were aware of the origins of trans-

41. Soike, “Affordable Barns,” 87–95.

42. Walters, “The Barn,” 59.43. The reconceptualization process for the American barn is obvi-

ous in nearly all the textbooks on rural architecture published early in thetwentieth century. Representative ones include Roberts, The Farmstead;Al-fred Hopkins, Modern Farm Buildings (New York: Robert M. McBride andCo., 1913); K. J. T. Ekblaw, Farm Structures (New York: Macmillan Co.,1914).

KANSAS BARNS IN TIME AND PLACE 19

verse-crib barns probably werechuckling to themselves in 1900as the design revolutionswrought by William Louden’shay carrier spread throughout theMidwest and beyond. The newbarns looked remarkably like theones their ancestors had built inTennessee and Missouri. The onlydifferences of note, in fact, were the presence of sidealleys in the new designs, greater height, narrowerwidth (unless sheds were added), and, of course, haybonnets (Figs. 3, 12). This type of barn, although pop-ular, has never acquired a commonly accepted name.Some writers have labeled it a western barn, after theregion of the country where it reaches its greatest rel-ative frequency, but to most owners it was (and is)just “the barn.”44 The Jefferson County farm on whichJohn Steuart Curry grew up had one of these westernbarns, and this was the type he painted most often. Aprominent example serves as the backdrop in Baptismin Kansas.

Sometimes, where the need for hay was especial-ly great, the basic western barn design could be fur-ther modified. In this situation the loft would beeliminated entirely and the eave sides extended out-ward in shed-like fashion some ten feet on eitherside. The wings were to provide stalls for animals, anarrangement that allowed the center portion of thestructure to be filled entirely with hay from floor torafters. Logically enough this design became knownas a hay or feeder barn (Fig. 13).45 Another possiblemodification, including the sheds but with the loftoptional, was to interrupt the single pitch of the roofwith a vertical wall between the sheds and the barncore. This procedure increased the storage capacity ofthe main part of the barn and created what is knownas a monitor roof (Fig. 14).

The redesign of barn shape, height, entry loca-tion, and stall position was easy to do once people

appreciated the basic implica-tions of the hay carrier. Anotherneeded modification was harderto implement. This was to createa loft area that would at oncehave a greater capacity than be-fore and be free of annoying di-agonal braces and cross beams.Such intrusive timbers inter-

fered with easy filling of the mow and alwaysseemed to find a worker’s shin or forehead. The loftproblem does not seem complicated when stated inthis way, but it was difficult to resolve. Those samebeams that gave hay workers fits also formed thebasic support system for the entire barn. Cut one ofthem and you seriously threatened basic structuralintegrity. The need for a more spacious loft thus wastied to a need for a totally different framing systemfor the barn as a whole. Heavy timbers spaced everyten feet or so certainly provided strength for a barn,but as the nineteenth century drew to a close, suchbeams were becoming more expensive to obtain, es-pecially in prairie states such as Kansas. Suspicionalso grew that they were unnecessary.

The goal of a number of farmer-inventors in the1880s was to find a way to fashion a barn out of ordi-nary plank lumber that would be both strong andfree of braces on the loft floor. A variety of solutionsemerged, all of them based on the general principle ofspacing the smaller boards closer together than be-fore and then bracing them well using the internalstrength of triangular trusses. This concept, calledballoon framing, was not new in 1880, as it alreadyhad been regularly employed on houses for someforty years. Its transfer to the big barns and their loftswas led by a pair of Ohioans, Joseph Wing and JohnShawver.46

Wing and Shawver both realized that roof designwas the key component of their framing endeavorand that the combination of building strength andopen loft space could best be resolved with a two-

20 KANSAS HISTORY

44. Richard V. Francaviglia, “Western American Barns: ArchitecturalForm and Climatic Considerations,” Yearbook of the Association of PacificCoast Geographers 34 (1972): 153–60; Paul F. Long, “Kansas Barns: UniqueRural Structures,” Kansas Territorial 4 (July-August 1984): 12–17.

45. Soike, “Affordable Barns,” 91–95.46. Lowell J. Soike, “Within the Reach of All: Midwest Barns Per-

fected,” in Noble and Wilhelm, Barns of the Midwest, 147–69.

pitched, or gambrel, roof. With an upper surfacesloped at approximately thirty-five degrees awayfrom the peak and a lower one at about sixty degrees,interior angles were created between the peak, mid-point, and base of the roof, plus the loft floor, thatcould be braced against one another without anyneed for disruptive posts out on the loft floor.Shawver was the first to perfect a popular system inthe 1880s, a design known for its exceptionalstrength. Its key element was a series of long planksthat extended upward from the loft floor to a purlinplate at the break in pitch of the roof (Fig. 15). Anoth-er series of planks ran from the top of the side wall tothe peak, creating a solid truss system.47

Shawver trusses remained popular until the endof big-barn construction. One expert estimated in1923 that half of the “better class” of barns built in theMidwest during the previous twenty years employedthis method, and its strength made it almost univer-sal for gambrel roofs spanning widths greater thanthirty-six feet.48 Shawver’s system went unchallengedfor about twenty years. However, for small and aver-

age-sized barns it was eventually sur-passed in cheapness and efficiency byJoseph Wing’s plan for a braced-rafterroof. Whereas Shawver utilized a set ofrigid trusses each spaced about twelvefeet apart, Wing decided to use lighterrafters and to space them only two feetfrom one another. Each set of theserafters was braced separately and waslight enough to be assembled and erect-ed easily (Fig. 16).49

Wing’s design first became knownabout 1909, and within a decade it wasthe most popular roof for new con-struction. The advent of braced-rafterbarns also represented the complete tri-umph of balloon framing. Even theShawver trusses, like all roof structuresbefore them, had required the support

of heavy posts and beams in the barn walls. The ver-

47. John L. Shawver, Plank Frame Barn Construction (New York:David Williams Co., 1904).

48. Farm Buildings (Davenport, Iowa: Gordon Van-Tine Co., 1923),18.

49. Soike, “Within the Reach of All,” 156–57.

KANSAS BARNS IN TIME AND PLACE 21

Fig. 14: A hay barn in central Kansas with a monitor roof. The extra height in the raisedcentral section greatly increases the storage capacity of this barn type.

Fig. 15: A cross section of a gambrel-roofed barn supported byShawver Trusses. Carpenters usually made the principal bracesfrom two-by-twelve-inch lumber. They would space individualtrusses at intervals of ten or twelve feet.

tical siding boards one saw from the outside were notload bearing; they simply connected timber to tim-ber. Because braced rafters distributed the weight ofthe roof evenly, walls could now change. They, too,came to employ light vertical studs at two-foot inter-nals. This process worked fine as long as these studswere braced, and builders soon discovered that theeasiest way to achieve this end was to change the ori-entation of the siding. Vertical boards, a trait that hadlong differentiated barns from houses visually, sud-denly gave way to horizontal ones (Fig. 17).50

Gambrel roofs were the final important elementin the reconception of the American barn that hadbegun with William Louden’s hay carrier in the1860s. Once the Shawver trusses had become accept-ed it was not long before companies mass-producedthem and made them available in local lumberyards.The same thing happened later for braced rafters andthen for a third support system that featured raftersbent or cut into the shape of a pointed arch. This thirdtype of support, which people soon labeled Gothic,carried the ideal of an expansive, open loft to its lit-eral and figurative pinnacle. Curved rafters almosthad to be made in a factory and were relatively ex-pensive. They produced a stylish barn, however, and

so began to appear on larger midwestern farms afterabout 1916. For many farmers, in fact, they were asignature of having arrived financially.51

In the period before 1900 the history of midwest-ern and Kansas barns is a transformation from a vari-ety of ethnic and regional types to a single kind ofgeneral-purpose structure. This one model thenevolved further in response to technological andother changes. Barns types became more complicatedafter 1900. On the one hand, the process of refiningthe basic barn continued unabated. The balloonframes and Gothic roofs previously discussed are as-pects of this development. So is an increased stan-dardization of building dimensions, hay-door de-signs, and cupola shapes. Mass production is theobvious cause here, beginning with independentlumberyards and by the 1910s extending to largebarn-specialty companies. The Gordon–Van TineCompany in Davenport, Iowa, and the Louden Man-ufacturing Company in Fairfield, Iowa, were espe-cially successful. Even Sears, Roebuck and Companyestablished a barn division and sold “Honorbuilt”designs. Certainly the prices were competitive. A kit

22 KANSAS HISTORY

50. Ibid., 160–61.

51. Ibid., 161–65.

Fig. 16: Construction underway in 1918 on the John L. Veselik barnnear Ruleton in Sherman County. The building features braced-rafters with each unit assembled on the ground and then raised intoplace. Scrap lumber is temporarily holding the correct rafter spacinguntil the roof sheathing is installed.

Fig. 17: A braced-rafter, gambrel-roofed barn in Rooks County on theElam Bartholomew farm in 1908. Note the horizontal siding, whichimplies an interior balloon frame constructed with closely spacedstuds. The hay door, instead of being simply hinged, is equipped witha track and counterweights so it can be rolled up and down.

for a thirty-two-by-fifty-four-footmodel from Gordon–Van Tinewith a braced-rafter roof, for ex-ample, sold for $1,240 in 1923.52

Post-1900 barn developmentswere not completely towardstandardization, however. Amer-ican farmers began to moveaway from general operations inwhich they produced a wide variety of crops and an-imals. Instead they decided to specialize in dairying,perhaps, or raising hogs. Engineers at the variousagricultural experiment stations across the countryresponded with new barn designs to facilitate thesechanges. The feeder barn previously discussed maybe regarded as one such specialized structure (Fig.13), but dairying prompted the biggest alterations.New Englanders had been experimenting for sometime with a system of outbuildings linked by con-necting sheds, but this idea did not spread.53 Slightlymore successful and certainly more widespread wasthe concept of a circular barn. Professor FranklinKing at the University of Wisconsin promoted thisdesign as an efficient way to utilize another of his petprojects: the silo. A circular barn built around a circu-lar silo seemed to him the epitome of a progressivedairy.54

Most dairy farmers and experiment station ex-perts decided that round barns were radical. Theyopted to modify the now familiar basic rectangularbarn model. A good sampling of these changes ap-pears in the only bulletin ever issued on barn con-struction by the Kansas Agricultural Experiment Sta-tion. An ideal dairy building, its writers said, shouldhave its long axis running north and south. This ori-entation would best capture summer breezes andalso maximize the amount of light that could enterthe structure. Light was especially important, for the

disinfectant properties of sun-light had become well known bythis time. The recommended for-mula was four square feet ofglass per cow, which meant a lotof windows. The accompanyingillustration shows twelve alongeach eave side and four otherson one gable end (Fig. 18).55

Sanitation and healthfulness were bywords for amodern dairy barn. Ceilings were lowered to controldrafts, concrete floors poured for cleanliness, and ex-pensive ductwork installed for better ventilation.From the outside the emphasis on health could beseen easily in two features. The old wooden cupolasof the past were replaced with new, specially de-signed metal ones that could waft away the gallonand a quarter of water each cow now was known togive off daily with her breath.56 The other feature wasmore symbolic. Owners often decided to abandontheir long-standing preference for red paint on barnsand opted instead for a more aseptic white.57

DECLINE, CONVERSION, AND PRESERVATION

As Americans returned to their normal rou-tines after World War II, few probably real-ized that the big barns that had defined

much of their lives for generations past were alreadyrelics on the landscape. Only a handful would bebuilt after 1945. Instead, the trend would be first tomodify them in various ways and then to abandon orraze most of the remaining structures. Like the storyof dinosaurs, it seemed, the barn’s time for ruling theMidwest had come to an unexpected end.

52. Ibid., 157–60; Farm Buildings, 1.53. Thomas C. Hubka, Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn: The

Connected Farm Buildings of New England (Hanover, N.H.: University Pressof New England, 1984).

54. John T. Hanou, A Round Indiana: Round Barns in the Hoosier State(West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1993); see also James R.Shortridge, “The Round Barns of Kansas,” Kansas History: A Journal of theCentral Plains 22 (Spring 1999): 48–89.

55. J.B. Fitch and V.R. Hillman, Dairy Buildings for Kansas, KansasState Agricultural College Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin 236(Topeka: Kansas State Printing Plant, 1925); see also W. A. Foster andDeane G. Carter, Farm Buildings (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1922),6–17; Frank M. White and Clyde I. Griffith, Barns for Wisconsin DairyFarms, University of Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Station Bulletin266 (Madison, Wisc.: State Printers, 1916).

56. Louden Company, Fairfield, Iowa, farm supply catalog, reprint,ed. L. R. Miller, The Complete Barn Book (Eugene, Ore: Mill Press, 1983),179.

57. David T. Stephens, “Midwest Barn Decor,” in Noble and Wil-helm, Barns of the Midwest, 239.

KANSAS BARNS IN TIME AND PLACE 23

The demise of the big barnswas not really unexpected, ofcourse. People just had takentheir presence so long for grant-ed that, perhaps subconsciously,they assumed the buildingswould survive even thoughtheir purpose was disappearing.Still, the signs were obvious inthe wholesale movement of people to urban areas(leaving thousands of barns abandoned), in the spe-cialization of the remaining farms (requiring differ-ent buildings), and in many other ways. The gasolineengine, for example, was perhaps as big a factor asany in the transition. As early as 1922 the authors ofa popular text on rural architecture cautioned peoplenot to keep tractors, automobiles, and such in thebarn. Not only would “the fumes from the manurehave a bad effect on the finish of the machines,” butalso “the presence of gasoline and oils, and the oper-ation of an engine in the barn is a dangerous firerisk.”58 New technology was an important factor aswell. Metals contractors began to offer roof trussesthat could span spaces of seventy feet or even more,and Howard Doane and Bernon Perkins, from St.Louis, patented what they called a pole barn in 1953.59

This structure, little more than corrugated sheets ofmetal placed over a frame of pressure-treated tim-bers, was cheap and flexible. It could easily housemachines too big to get through the old (and increas-ingly proverbial) barn door.

This article’s concern is not with the recentchanges in rural building technology, however, butwith the old barns themselves. Will these friendly gi-ants all disappear? Should at least some of them besaved, and, if so, how? If I had been asked the first ofthese two questions twenty years ago, I perhapswould have answered yes. Barns were coming down

fast in those days, as farmers ei-ther bulldozed old structures toavoid paying taxes on them orleft the roofs unrepaired longenough so that collapse occurredon its own. Many old barns oftenwere prone to collapse anyway,because their structural integri-ties had been compromised by a

gutting of their interiors. Hay storage from ground torafters became the fate of many, and then poor stack-ing would lead to side pressures that forced walls offtheir foundations. Suburbanites even got in on theprocess. Stories have it that many such folks wouldbuy a piece of rural land solely for its barn. They thenwould carefully dismantle the structure and use theweathered boards as fashionable paneling for homeand office walls.

Kansans and other midwesterners who loveold barns have more reason for hope in 1999than in 1979. Tastes in wall paneling have

changed, and, more important, we have begun to re-alize that barns and other buildings that reflect every-day life in the past are as important to protect as arebanks, cathedrals, and other such monumental struc-tures. How better to understand the workings of anineteenth-century farm than to study how its lifewas expressed and coordinated in its most funda-mental building? How better to follow the changes inrural America than to trace these things in tangibleform through the barn evolution discussed on thepreceding pages? Then too, everyday (or vernacular)buildings reveal and evoke much more than just eco-nomic activity. People spent a great dealx of time intheir barns. They were sanctuaries during episodes ofwounded pride, places to escape the cold in the mid-dle of winter chores, the sites of dances, and, ofcourse, places to meet special friends and lovers. Andsurely I am but one of thousands of Kansans who hasonce swung grandly on a sturdy hay rope from onebeam to another.

How can we move from nostalgia and concern tosomething more? A few barns can be saved by turn-ing them into museums, weaving studios, restau-

24 KANSAS HISTORY

58. Foster and Carter, Farm Buildings, 52.59. Deane G. Carter, “Factory-Built Farm Buildings,” Agricultural En-

gineering 37 (April 1956): 255–60; Glenn A. Harper and Steve Gordon,“The Modern Midwestern Barn, 1900–Present,” in Noble and Wilhelm,Barns of the Midwest, 225–26; Wallace Ashby, “Fifty Years of Developmentin Farm Buildings,” Agricultural Engineering 42 (June 1957): 426–32, 459.

rants, and the like. The LeglerBarn Museum in Lenexa and FireStation Number Four in Lawrenceare examples. Most old barns aretoo remote from urban centers forthis kind of radical conversion,however. The best advice forthese structures may come fromsteps already taken in other mid-western states. People in Michi-gan and Ohio have been especial-ly active in expanding on a 1987initiative by the National Trust forHistoric Preservation. The Na-tional Trust, with cosponsorshipfrom Successful Farming maga-zine, began a practical program toadvise interested owners howthey might adapt their old barnsto new farm uses. They have described the principlesof timber-frame construction, for example, so thatpeople might better know how such frames might bemodified to create new spaces. Workers in the stateprograms have made copies of useful publicationsavailable and compiled lists of qualified local con-tractors and carpenters who are willing to consultand/or complete projects. They even have createdhome pages on the worldwide web. Kansans couldeasily do these same things.60

The National Trust and state-level initiatives alsomake people aware that many vernacular buildings,including barns, are eligible for listing on the Nation-al Register of Historic Places. The registration processrequires some time and research, but once done, thebarn may qualify for a 20 percent investment taxcredit for many rehabilitation expenses if it is an in-come-producing property, or for a Heritage TrustFund grant.61

Finally, for anyone interested in barns but lackingfirst-hand knowledge, a field visit with an olderKansan is recommended. The most pleasant part ofpreparing this article was time spent doing suchwalking and listening. Barns are wonderful vehiclesfor loosening memories and tongues. You will learnmuch about the structure itself, but do not be sur-prised if the talk also moves on to issues of corporatefarming, carpentry, and one-room schools. Barns arepowerful icons for a great many subjects.

60. For information on the 1987 national initiative, see MarilynFedelchak and Byrd Wood, Protecting America’s Historic Countryside(Washington, D.C.: National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1988); MaryHumstone, Barn Again! A Guide to Rehabilitation of Older Farm Buildings(Des Moines: Meredith Corporation and National Trust for HistoricPreservation, 1988). Useful examples of conversions for new farm usesare in Dexter W. Johnson, Using Old Farm Buildings, North Dakota StateUniversity Agricultural Research Report No. AERR 88-1 (Fargo, N.D.:North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station, 1988). A more recent andmore localized book is Barn Again! Barn Preservation Information Handbook:A Guide for Individuals and Organizations (Denver: National Trust for His-toric Preservation, Mountain/Plains Regional Office, 1992). State-specificinformation packets for barn rehabilitation are available for sale fromMichigan State University Museum, History Division, West Circle Drive,East Lansing, MI 48824; and from Ohio State University, Kottman Hall,Room 385, Columbus, OH 43210. The National Trust’s “Barn Again!” Website is at <http://www.agriculture.com/ba>; Michigan State University’s“Barn Journal” is at <http://museum.cl.msu.edu/barn/index.html.

61. Kansas information on the National Register of Historic Places isavailable from the Cultural Resources Division, Kansas State HistoricalSociety, 6425 SW Sixth Avenue, Topeka, KS 66615.

KANSAS BARNS IN TIME AND PLACE 25

Fig. 18: The “modern” dairy barn recommended to Kansas farmers by experts at the State Agri-cultural Experiment Station. Dairy specialty barns can be identified by their efficient roof vents,nearby silo, large number of windows, and, often, white paint.