Silent Sentinals

They stand in fields and sometimes in young forest; most are tall while a few are quite short, some are damaged and many don’t have their tops, some stand alone and others have company, they come in a variety of colors and materials and sizes. Their reason for being is gone and eventually they’ll either collapse or be removed. What are they? They’re the silos that stood next to the barns of dairy farms throughout the northern states. Now we occasionally find the silo standing alone without its barn: the barn having collapsed, burned or been removed

The idea of using a silo to store grain originated in the Middle East, but they were pits or trenches where dry grain was stored. Prior to the early 1800s cattle were fed dry hay during the winter, then it was discovered that chopped moist green fodder (now called silage) could be stored over the winter if air could be excluded and that it was more nutritious for cattle than dry hay. At first silage was stored in covered trenches, but it was hard to exclude air and much of the silage spoiled.

And so, in the 1870s vertical tower silos began to be built, at first they were square or octagonal and built of wood or stone. However, it was difficult to pack the silage tightly enough in the corners to exclude air, resulting in spoiled silage. To solve that problem farmers began to build round silos where the silage could be packed uniformly and which were more structurally stable. Reportedly in the early 1880s there were about 90 silos in the U.S.; by 1895 there were 50,000 and a few years later the number was over a half million.

Most of the early silos were built of wood, usually of vertical boards spiked together and encircled by steel bands to hold the pressure of the silage. Few wooden silos were built after 1900, most are long gone but some still survive. It’s extremely rare to find a wooden silo standing alone, but here’s one – leaning and much overgrown –

Because the wooden silos were vulnerable to decay and fire, it wasn’t long before other materials came into use. For a while ceramic tiles were used –

And galvanized steel, of which there are few still standing –

In this area, concrete tiles became the material of choice for building silos and so most of of those lonesome silos standing without their barns were built of concrete tiles with steel bands holding the tile in place –

More recently glass-lined steel silos began sprouting on farms throughout northcentral Pennsylvania. But even these more modern silos aren’t immune to being abandoned to silently stand unused on a farm without dairy cattle –

Farming technology has changed markedly and now silage is often stored in concrete bunks covered by tarps held down by old tires. The bunks are much safer – many farmers have died when they entered silos to deal with problems in the machinery or jammed silage – and more convenient than tower silos.

We’re saying a slow good-bye to the tower silo, just as we’re saying a slow farewell to the many wooden barns.