09/07/2026
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1EX2TkcNiQ/
Interesting history. we have a round concrete silo on our farm.
The tall, round farm silo that shows up on postcards, in paintings, and in most people's mental picture of a farm has a surprisingly specific origin. It traces back to 1888 and a Wisconsin dairy farmer named John Steele, who had been using a square wooden silo for years and kept losing silage to spoilage in its corners, where the packed feed never sealed tightly enough against the walls.
Steele's fix came from an unlikely place: a wooden washtub sitting around his farm. If a round tub could hold water tight using nothing but curved wooden staves bound with metal hoops, he reasoned, the same principle should work at a much larger scale. He built a round silo, 18 feet across and 30 feet tall, out of wooden staves banded together exactly like a barrel, and it stood in daily use for 27 years.
The idea spread fast. Agricultural scientists refined it further within a few years, and by the 1890s, farmers across the Midwest were abandoning square, corner-wasting silos for Steele's round design. Vertical staves bound with iron bands became the accepted standard construction method, and while wood was the original material, the same basic stave-and-hoop structural principle carried forward into concrete, which is what most surviving tower silos, including ones still standing today, are actually built from.
It's a small, satisfying kind of engineering story: a genuinely persistent problem, corners that never sealed right, solved by simply asking what a laundry tub already knew how to do, then building it thirty feet tall.
