Lewis Round Barn

About this property

The Lewis Round Barn is located in Mendon, Illinois, in northwestern Adams County. It is one of 14 round barns recognized by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. The barn was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 29, 2003. When Charles E. Lewis decided he needed a large barn for his large herd of cattle and hogs, he thought outside the box, so to speak. Having heard about three round barns built around 1900 for the College of Agriculture at the University of Illinois, he was intrigued. The efficiency of the round barn's structure is what impressed Lewis, but he didn't need the university's barns - he needed a much larger barn. His mind began to build a vision of a barn that was much larger than any round barn built in the Midwest, at the time. He selected 40 acres (16 ha) of timbered land from the 160-acre (65 ha) Grove Place, a recent acquisition of his father's estate. The land was thick with large elm and oak trees, as well as other native Illinois tree species. Lewis built a portable sawmill at the site and hired several men to log the land with cross-cut saws and axes, while also working the logs into lumber and piling them to air dry. This occurred during the fall and continued well into the winter of 1911. Lambert Huber, a prominent carpenter in the area, was hired as architect, engineer and building foreman. Though he had never built a round barn, he decided to undertake the project. Even with Huber hired, construction on the barn could not commence until 1914, when all the lumber had sufficiently cured. The project itself was somewhat complicated, even for a round barn. The roof of the barn was to be an entirely self-supporting dome without structural support, to save the outside walls of the building. The four-section rafters of the roof would be reinforced at each of the joints. The project began with the digging of ditches where concrete foundation footings were poured. The footings would support the outer, circular wall. A 24-foot (7.3 m) diameter circle was laid out in order to accommodate the silo and silage feeding bunk around the silo. A 40-foot (12 m) stave silo was constructed at the site, with an 18-foot (5.5 m) diameter. The silo was constructed out of Douglas fir staves that had been totally cleared of knots. The barn itself had siding of one inch by 12-inch (300 mm) white pine, and long, wooden shingles made from Western red cedar. Of all the wood required to construct the Lewis Round Barn, only the shingles and siding materials had to be purchased; the rest came from the property's woodland that was logged to create the barn site.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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