Round Barns

Wisps of cloud crept over the forested hilltops last week. Green fields glistened in the intermittent rain. Southwest Wisconsin’s beautiful Driftless area, never flattened by glaciers, gets its name from the lack of glacial drift or sediment. Maps from the Vernon County Historical Society guided us over rugged, narrow country roads to find the county’s nine surviving round barns. 

Without much thought, I’d assumed round barns were an old cultural tradition from some obscure corner of Scandinavia, brought by immigrants too recent to have adopted the more common rectangular shape. Wrong. The round barns of Vernon County were a modern innovation to meet the needs of the area’s growing dairy industry. Fifteen were constructed after World War I by farmer/carpenter Algie Shivers, son of a former slave who had moved to Wisconsin on the underground railroad.

Most round barns were built in the Midwest between 1890 and 1930. Agricultural colleges promoted the circular shape as the barn of the future, a model of efficiency. Cows stood like spokes of a wheel, narrow head toward a central feeding trough and silo, broader hind end toward the outer wall with space for a milking stool. Round barns were  wind resistant and saved on building material.

Though round barns were never a majority, Wisconsin once had more than two hundred. Electricity and mechanization made them obsolete. Linear milking pipelines, machine-made square hay bales, and prefabricated flat building materials were all better suited to rectangles. Luckily for us, some owners have preserved the outmoded round structures for other uses such as storage. The one-time barn of the future is rapidly fading into the past.