by John Awald, SD Agricultural Heritage Museum
The pioneers who came to South Dakota before the railroads built their barns with materials they found at hand. They built stone barns, log barns and earth barns. The most common early South Dakota barns (and houses, too) were dugouts or soddies.
A dugout was simply a room-sized hole dug into a hillside, then covered with a small roof.
Soddies were built by cutting and laying strips of sod like bricks until a solid wall was formed. Building a sod barn took a lot of physical effort; the loose earth walls needed continual maintenance and they were dirty inside. Their advantage was that they were cheap to construct with materials found at hand and the natural insulating properties of the thick sod walls did a very good job of protecting farm animals from summer's heat and winter's cold.
When the railroads arrived in South Dakota they brought a relatively new product with them: precut dimensional lumber, two x fours, sixes, eights, tens, and larger boards. Dimensional lumber created a whole new way of building homes and barns.
The first barns constructed from dimensional lumber in South Dakota were English-style barns. They had two levels: the ground floor housed livestock, the loft was used to store straw and hay.
The prairie or western barn is an adaptation of the traditional English barn. It had lean-tos added to the sides of the English-style barn giving them their characteristic shape.
Considerable effort was given to designing a barn that utilized dimensional lumber to create a barn that was both strong and free of braces on the loft floor. Joseph Wing and John Shawver are credited with adapting balloon framing to barn construction in the 1880s. The result was the gambrel-roofed barn that is characteristic of most barns in South Dakota.
By the turn of the century, land grant universities (such as South Dakota State University) and commercial architectural firms were busy designing and planning "scientific" barns. These plans would produce maximum space with the least amount of lumber, improve conditions for raising and feeding animals, and increase production.While the round barn was popular in some areas, only 30 round barns are known to exist in South Dakota today. Architect Andrew Jackson Downing is usually credited for the design of round barns. He promoted round barns because they required less lumber to construct that other barns of the period and design with a central silo surrounded by animal pens provided for efficient livestock feeding. A religious community, the Shakers, employed the design of a round barn extensively in their communities. They believed the circle was the most perfect shape created by God. They thought that round barns had the added benefit not having corners for the devil to hide.
In addition to truly round barns there were multi sided structures that appeared to be circular. George Washington's 16-sided barn built in 1763 is considered to be the earliest barn of this type.
South Dakota has one particularly interesting and unusual type of barn construction that was developed at South Dakota State University in the 1920s and 1930s. Rammed earth construction, an ancient method using tamped clay, sand and water, was refined by university professors Ralph Patty and H. H. Delong.