SILOS

This story was included in a book of anecdotes published by the Merrimack, NH Historical Society in 2008

Books have been written about American barns. Common folklore describes gatherings of neighbors on a summer day for a barn raising. While the men accomplished the job through a Herculean effort, womenfolk prepared food for a feast that was to ensue as evening approached, after which unspent energy was exhausted while dancing on the new barn floor. But building a silo is a different matter and you seldom hear about it. For one thing, they weren’t even around until the turn of the twentieth century when machinery became available for processing the crops to fill them, which was mostly corn and millet.

Driving across America, you see all kinds of silos, built of wood,, concrete, sheet metal, or ceramic blocks. By far the most impressive are the giant silos that stand clustered in the prairies, adjacent to railroad tracks, where grain is stored before shipment to the markets of the world. But the most numerous are the silos that are attached to dairy barns, built to contain cattle feed for the winter months.

I have a personal acquaintance with silos, but the story begins before I was born, on the New Hampshire farm where Ma and Pa raised their family.

On a sunny October morning in the mid-1920’s Pa drove away from the farm, seated on the wagon’s hardwood seat, urging his team of young, lively roans into a trot. A half dozen turkeys in the driveway scattered as the horses thundered toward them. There had been a frost, and the air shimmered in the purple haze that comes only in Indian summer. Poplars and birches and maples had dressed themselves in yellows and reds. The fields were shaven and browned, and the barn was filled with hay.

Ma watched from the kitchen door, holding a baby in a blue blanket on one arm until Pa reached the end of the long driveway and turned left onto Wire Road. She listened awhile to the pleasant sounds of the wagon wheels clacking back and forth on their axles, until those sounds too disappeared. She gazed fondly on three daughters, jump-roping to rhythmic chants on a sandy spot in the front yard. Then she returned to her chores in the kitchen.

Less than two miles distant, in a little settlement called Reed’s Ferry, but still a part of Merrimack, Pa reined the horses into the Gordon’s front drive, rounded the house and stopped at the side entrance. On the back of the wagon were two one-hundred pound burlap sacks of potatoes that Mr. Gordon had ordered.

Mr. Gordon was a highly respected man in Merrimack. His family underwrote the design and construction of Merrimack’s public library, a gem of a stone building that opened your eyes as you passed by. It has since been bastardized by an atrocious cement block and brick add-on, a product of good intents on the part of the town’s leaders, but reflective of Neanderthal design thinking during times when preservation of valuable architecture was just a budding idea.

Mr. Gordon came to the door when Pa knocked, balancing a sack of potatoes on his shoulder. He led him across the kitchen to the basement door, down the stairs and over to the vegetable cellar where cabbages, carrots, turnips, beets, apples and other fruits and vegetables were stored for the winter. Pa returned to the wagon to get the other sack, and then emptied both into a bin reserved for potatoes. The two men then returned to the wagon where Mr. Gordon retrieved a money clip from his pocket, peeled four ones from it, and handed them to Pa.

“You know, Stanley,” he said. “There’s a way for you to build a silo for your farm.”

“Ya, I like to build one,” Pa said. “But cost many dollar.”

“ I was thinking. We just finished building the new concrete water tower on McElwein Street. The old one was taken down. Good solid redwood staves. You could build a couple of silos out of them.”

Pa brightened. “You still got?”

“Yeah, they’re stacked up behind the new tower. We want to get rid of them.”

“How much cost?” Pa was hoping it was nothing. It might be worth it to the town fathers to have them hauled away.

“Oh, twenty-five dollars will do it.”

Pa didn’t have twenty five dollars, but he had eight dollars and fifty cents plus the four dollars Mr. Gordon had just paid him for the potatoes, and he had an idea. He dug down into his pockets and handed Mr. Gordon twelve dollars and fifty cents.

“I bring you rest,” he said.

The two shook hands, Pa jumped on the wagon and drove off toward home, taking the back way, where a short jog on a side road led to Viskin’s place. He hoped to find him at home.

Viskin was a jovial Ukrainian Kulak of diminished fortune who arrived in America at about the same time as Ma and Pa did. He lived on a small farm adjacent to a farm where Ma and Pa had first settled. He kept a few cows and other livestock and had a fair team of horses. Pa and Viskin were passing good friends, but there was a slight language problem. Pa couldn’t speak Russian, but Viskin had command of a somewhat fractured Polish. The two were thus able to get along. Ma never connected with Viskin’s wife, however, as neither spoke the other’s language.

Viskin brought to America the picturesque life of a Russian Kulak. On occasion in winter he would appear at the farm, bundled in a sheepskin coat, driving a one-horse sleigh, beside him a round of cheese or other spare foodstuffs. His family was small - ours was large, and the importance of sharing was taken for granted and appreciated. Pa and Viskin would enjoy a round of drinks in the kitchen, and then he would depart with bells ringing on his horse’s harness and red-trimmed sleigh and a wave of a mittened hand before disappearing from view.

Viskin was at home and together they drove to the water tower to inspect the lumber and hardware. The wood was flawless. California redwood staves almost three inches thick, six inches wide, and twenty feet long. There was indeed enough material to build two ten-foot diameter silos.

Viskin liked the idea of having a silo too, so he paid Pa twelve-fifty for his half and they agreed to jointly build two silos, one at Viskin’s’s place and one at our farm, both adjacent to their barns. So in a way they had a couple of silo raisings, topped by celebratory drinks at the conclusion of each job. But it was nothing like the legendary barn raisings of old.

I don’t know how many times Pa actually filled the silo. I have no memory of anything but an empty structure with a leaky roof, and years-old, dry corn shards on the concrete floor. It was a great place to play. The echoes in that empty chamber were something else. Then, in the late thirties, when we got into serious dairying on the farm, we began to fill the silo again.

World War II started. Half the family of twelve was called up or enlisted. At sixteen I was too young to enlist. I was the one left behind to help run the farm.

In the spring of 1944, when dairy farming was well underway, I got to talking to Pa about building a second silo and the subject of Viskin’s silo came up. Viskin was dead, but the silo still stood, with a caved-in roof. Pa offered the new owners of the farm twenty-five dollars for the silo. They wanted a hundred and Pa offered fifty, which they accepted.

Together we dug a four-foot deep hole, about eleven feet in diameter, located symmetrically with the old silo at the east end of the barn. We poured a concrete floor, then built forms for the round foundation. We poured more concrete and at last had everything ready for the erection phase. I then drove our Reo platform truck to Viskin’s place to get the old silo.

I had no idea how one should go about dismantling a silo, but I thought that if I knocked out the spacers between the doors, one at a time, the staves would collapse inward on themselves like a teepee and all the iron rings that held it together would simply pile up on the ground. I had a long ladder and climbed up it, knocking out the spacers with a sledge hammer until there was only one left at the top, holding the whole works together. I thought, “What have I done?” as I looked 20 feet down at the ground. But I plunged on, and with one blow knocked the last spacer out.

Just as I had thought, all the staves did collapse inward, leaving me standing at the top of a twenty-foot ladder that was leaning on nothing. What happened next was a feat that would have made performers at the cirque d’soliel proud. I dropped the hammer and made it to the bottom of the ladder safely, and to boot was able to grasp the ladder so it did not fall over.

Pa and I erected the silo over a period of two days. We then assembled the iron hoops that held it together every couple of feet, and tightened them securely. Then it was time to put on a roof, which Pa left for me to do. Pa didn’t like heights. I didn’t care for the round, pitched roof on the old silo, so I decided to build a gambrel roof, with two distinct pitches, in an octagonal shape. That looked so good that I decided to do the same on the old silo. After that, a white paint job on both structures brought the whole affair to a respectable conclusion.

So that’s the whole story of how the farm got its two silos. Maybe it was good training. A good part of my engineering career after college dealt with building underground silos for Atlas Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles.

Copyright © 2007 Edward Hujsak