Silos — tower-like structures on farms that hold fermented feed for livestock — have dotted the Midwestern landscape for 150 years. But they’re threatened by development and old age. One “silo hunter” in northern Illinois has been tracking down silos her grandfather built before they disappear.
Marianne May drove around the backroads of McHenry County on a recent afternoon, scanning for those tall, round structures with a shallow point at the top that’s characteristic of her grandfather’s silos. Some of them have a little diamond shape on the very top — his signature.
She’s a self-proclaimed silo hunter, and she comes back to her hometown throughout the year to find ever more silos that her grandfather, Frank May, built on some of the oldest farms in the Midwest.
“I grew up in Richmond, and I always knew where a lot of my grandpa’s silos were,” she said. “I just sort of had them in my head. I never really thought that I would do anything about it. They just were always there, part of the landscape.”
Silos probably fade into the background for most people who live in the Corn Belt. Though they often serve as landmarks, people’s connection to them has tended to be utilitarian. Occasionally, silos have been saved by being converted into housing or public space, but many others have been destroyed.
But their legacy is rooted in Illinois. Historians believe the first one in the Midwest was built in Spring Grove, a village in McHenry County. Bill Kemp, historian with the McLean County Museum of History, said silos transformed agriculture in the Midwest.
“Silos and all of these magnificent, very utilitarian buildings,” Kemp said, “really speak to this rich, dynamic, very diverse agriculture that was practiced up until World War II — or the decade after World War II — when industrialization and commercialization and singular, two-crop farming came into play.”
Farmers used to have to rely on dried hay to feed their animals over the winter, but it was bulky and it didn’t last long. But silos are airtight containers that farmers could pack tightly with corn, allow it to ferment and then store it for years. They used to be made of wood, but when people like Frank May started using concrete in the early 1900s, farmers could grow their livestock herds even larger.
Kemp said initially, farmers were skeptical of this new invention.
“Once you would have a farmer in a particular township or in a rural neighborhood construct a silo and find how useful it was,” he said, “that would be quickly adapted by his or her neighbors.”
It’s an essential structure.
“We tend to forget about the built environment of the Corn Belt,” he said. “And all these wonderful stories — the buildings and the structures in the countryside that people drive past all the time but never really think about — what do they say about the past?”
Marianne May said silo hunting can be a thankless task. She’s been doing this for six years and has identified almost 200 of her grandfather’s silos. She said there may be at least that many more.
“Almost every place I go, there’s something,” she said. “There’s some connection, whether it’s somebody in my family or extended family, or maybe they worked with Frank. There’s something fun to be discovered.”
So much of the work is investigation and guesswork. But she can speculate what it was like for her grandparents to grow up as neighbors, just like she wonders why the silos are clustered in groups, or why he used one shape over another.
She found a silo at Frank May’s childhood home, as well as a matching silo at the farmhouse across the street. That’s where Marianne’s grandmother grew up.
“I think it’s important that these silos are identified,” she said. “The locations where they are and where they were, because each time I come home, there are some gone that get pushed over for development or just fall over.”
It’s a reminder that May’s project is never-ending and that it’s a gift to learn more about the family history of the area’s farming community — and the mark farming made on the Midwestern landscape.
This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.
Wisconsin Watch is a member of the Ag & Water Desk network. Sign up for our newsletters to get our news straight to your inbox.
