How about it fellas!?! Let's see your pictures or hear your stories about wooden corn cribs...long and narrow or the double sided or the simple snowfence variety. My dad and grandpa had a narrow one, maybe 20-24 feet in length. It did become a club house and jungle gym for my sisters and I as we grew up. I do remember taking it down in the mid 1980's. The neighbor up the road who my dad helped shelling out his double corn crib and a much longer and taller narrow crib. Both still stand today, unused.
There is the longest corn crib that I ever seen down by the intersection of Hwy 52 and Hwy 16 near Mabel, Minnesota. My dad and I always would comment about that crib in the late fall as it was full or in the spring as they were emptying it.
There are many wooden cribs around today, being used or not. So, let's see your pictures of yours and hear the stories!
I have found a couple of smaller wooden double sided corn cribs on farm sites that I would like to move back to the farm....hmmmm....someday!!
An outside picture of my grandpas grainery. I'll get more pictures when the snow melts. It has an A.F. Meyer elevator inside. It also has a farrowing house connected to it. The picture is looking south. Both the east and west ends were added on. It also has a shelter on the south side for cattle/hogs. The original part was built in the early 1920's. It originally had a leanto on the north side.
There is a fascinating topic. Wooden corn cribs can be a highly personal look at a farm or farmer. Some bought the ready made cribs from local sawmills or custom made there own.I didnt realize till i was a teenager when a neighboring farmer told me about the crib on the farm where he grew up had a fan in it. I also didnt know that they had ones with a built in elevator. My grandfather had a 6' by 40 ' built alogside his barn.I later stored my own corn in the same crib.Wooden cribs vary all thru the usa and tell something about the area due to the width and shapes too. I was always told wooden cribs would pull moisture out of the corn.
I remember when I was a kid grandpa had a crib that was built out of ceder poles and 2x4 utility wire. The crib was no longer in use when I remember it and it was torn down in the late 80's. It looked like a good design and now that I bought the farm from grandma I am thinking about putting one like it back up.
three years ago i rebilt my double corn crib. it was about to fall down, with the forks of my frontend loader i gently raised the roof. ended up on the north side replacing everything below the roof. on the out side. was reely made to have to cut off a foot on the wall studs. but by the time i was done you could have put all the scrap in a bushle basket and had room left over. don't know when it was built but it has drop down doors shovel in the corn to fill it . i fixed it for an elevator. everybody thought i was nuts for fixing it . but is a lot easyer to grind out of than a wire crib on a cement slab don't have any pictures and don;t know how to put them on. chris
We used to have a double drive through crib as well. We would fill the sides, then the middle and any left over corn would go on the ground. It was never fully converted to fill with an elevator. You would put the elevator through a hole in the roof and fill the sides via down spouts. There were hinge down doors in the middle where they used to fill the cribs by hand. Due to a poor foundation it was slowly falling down so we eventually tore it down. I do have some pictures of it around. Will have to dig them up. There are a few around the area yet with internal elevators. Will have to do some photo taking.
This is my first post, I've been lurking around here for awhile but never contributed.
This crib is around the corner from our place. It's an abandoned farmstead where most of the buildings are down or falling down. Someone built the crib right though, it's still standing straight and proud. It would look better if it was filled.
The inside of the elevator where you dump the wagons. My grandma forgot to close the doors once when she was hauling loads. She came back with another load and she was going kind of fast and before she could do anything she went bouncing over this with the tractor.
Some outside pitures. I will have to find some pictures from when this granary was just built back in the 1920's and put them on here. It is really neat to see how it has changed over the years.
Boy ! Some of those are a lot more complicated than the ones ive seen. Pretty cool!I was thinking the other day about how neat it would be to do a book on just corn cribs.Grain bins all look a like but corn cribs can tell you a lot about the area,climate, farm and the farmer himself.. Basicly a artform unto themselves.
The hoist lifter for lifting wagons without hydraulic hoists. the first truck my gret grandpa had didn't have a hoist so he just used the one in the granary. The ceiling was too low to raise the truck high enough to dump it so he had someone raise the ceiling in that part of the alley. You can kind of see it here. On the top of the picture you can see one end of the low part and right above the gravity flow wagon is where it ended.
Over Christmas break, my wife and I traveled to see her relatives in Omaha. On our way back, we traveled up Hwy 71 in west central IA. Along the way I took some photos of wooden corn cribs. There wasn't much of a style difference along the way. I did take a photo of a series of small corn cribs next to some silos. Maybe they are not corn cribs, but are still interesting. I did miss taking a photo of a large crib made of galvanized metal with air slots, double round crib with a common roof.
As we traveled up the road, I wondered if this is corn country what kind and how big were the corn cribs they had in the day of ear corn?
We did stop in Avoca, IA for the tour at Farmall Land. It was well worth the admission price and time spent there.While there, I did take a photo of a RARE IH tractor-706 with a 234 mounted corn picker with my wife sitting in the drivers seat!
I grew up knowing ours as the"wagon shed".Building is 40ft.long with a12ft.wide aisle,6ft.wide cribs are the walls running full length of building.crib heigth is 16ft..Had 3 fill holes in the roof on each side to fill it.I suppose sometime in the 40s an addition on each side was added,12ft.aisle and 6ft.crib full length of building,heigth was 14ft.for rain snow runoff.Main part is still good but additions falling down.I remember shoveling corn off of flat racks with 2ft sides into an American Standard elevator to fill it.Seemed to take forever.Last time it was filled sometime mid80s,my Dad picked with our 88diesel and a neighbors 1-row New Idea and I unloaded(with gravity boxes this time),lost my wallet kicking corn down ,and found it again the next summer unloading,all chewed up by mice!
KA656, you and missus must have driven right by our farm on Hwy 92, a half hour east of Omaha. (20 miles north of the cafe in "Turn the Page" by Bob Seeger.) Next time you come down, let me know. There are some interesting cribs just a bit off the pavement that are still standing (for now, anyway), anywhere from poor to great shape. I'd probably be able to get you inside a few of them. There were a lot of different styles around here--single straights, double "drive through" straights, double rounds, quadruple rounds, squirrel cages, snow fence piles, and more. There is a galvanized metal single straight on a gravel road not too far from us, as well as a couple of round barns that look like they have granary centers. I'm low-tech, but you can get some good photos for yourself and this forum if you give me a couple days heads-up before your next visit.
Avoca is a good show--I think they still have a similar place for Allis-Chalmers in Griswold, not too far away.
Was talking to my father-in-law last Saturday about his corn picking days back in the 60's. In the late 60's he built the biggest corn crib in the neighborhood using square creosoted posts, wire mesh panels and a concrete floor. It was 80' long, 16' high and 12' wide. He made it so that he could drive in one end and scoop it out with the manure loader and load it into a gravity wagon and then empty it from the wagon into his grinder mixer. He had his fill of shoveling it from the round wire cribs and that was why he went this way. He used a New Idea 2 row pull type picker pulled by a JD 4020 Diesel. He stopped picking corn in '75 when he changed over to shelling corn. The crib posts are still standing today, he removed the wire panels and built a feed bunk along 1 row of posts for feeder cattle and built a shed over the old crib on both sides with a cement floor on one side for machinery and the other side has a dirt floor for cattle.
Brilliant! I've thought about something similar and maybe use a small skidloader to unload it. Also have a sectional air ventilator in middle to can take out of way to unload. and blow air thru when needed.Love to see pics sometime.
We lost our double sided corn crib with overhead storage on my parents farm 2 weeks ago....One of the saddest days of my life!! Hired someone to take down the old barn so we could put a new shed, barn caught on fire and took the corn crib with it. Crib was 26X40 with a Meyers dump pit elevator, had center drags in the ventilators was built in 1949 and used till sometime in the 90's. It held 9500-10,000 bushels of corn and 3500 in the overhead bin of soy beans. Insurance company for the person taking down the barn is having me price out what a new crib would cost to build then will depreciate it to come up with a settlement. Thank God we got the tractors out of the crib before it went up into flames. The crib was about 40' away from the barn. We had moved everything from the barn into the ventilators to store until the new shed was done. Lost tools, fencing supplies, welder and parts to old antique tractors.....just to much to all mention. There is now way to replace this family monument. I was lucky enough to find blue prints for a corn crib similar but with a cupola, plus it is impossible to get a price on what the elevator would cost nowadays since no one manufactures them anymore. Any suggestions on how about getting a price for rebuilding a corn crib that would be fair? Thanks
Here is a photo of the longest corn crib I have seen. It is locate just west of Mabel, MN on the intersection of Hwy 52 and Hwy 44. My dad and I are always amazed at the length and how many bushels of ear corn it held. I wonder how long it would take to shell out that crib?!?! It is ashame it sits empty, but I guess that is just the way farming is today.
I will continue to take photos on my journeys of wooden corn cribs and post them here.
-- Edited by KA656 on Thursday 1st of November 2012 11:14:44 AM
Saturday, my dad and I went on a road trip to Dyersville to National Toy Show. I took my camera along for the purpose to catching some photos of any corn cribs along the way. I missed a couple along the way, one filled with corn, but here is one that did I get a good shot at. It is nice to see the new harvest sitting in the crib! This photo was taken outside of Decorah, Iowa.
I reconize those last two cribs pictured! The one pictured full is across the road from my friends place. There are sevaral guys in that neighborhood still picking.
We recently bought an old round wooden corn/grain bin. I can't find any info on it. It's only the second one I've seen. It originally came from a grainery in Unionville, MO. It's about 16 foot across and roughly 20 foo tall with a tin roof. Any ideas where I could find information about it?
I'd also like to know if anyone has any suggestions for how to preserve the wood. It's the original wood and very weathered. We had to replace the bottom 3 rows because of so much rot but would like to keep the rest. We don't want to change the weathered look, just keep it from further deterioration.
Here are some corn cribs from the Randy Grabau farm south of Wykoff, MN. The farm has been in the family for over 150 years. I had some fun opening up his fields for him this year.
