W968 State Highway 11, Town of Spring Grove, WI 53520

Summary

Albert and Minna Ten Eyck Round Barn
W968 WI 11, Town of Spring Grove, Green County
Date of Construction: 1922

This distinctive round barn, constructed of wood and clay tile, was built in 1922 by Albert and Minna Ten Eyck. This true round barn has two floors, measures sixty feet in diameter with a central interior silo measuring ten feet in diameter, and is an excellent example of the round barn form. The Ten Eyck family first settled in the area around Brodhead, Wisconsin in Green County in 1839, when Jacob Ten Eyck, of old New York Dutch heritage, was one of the first white settlers in the region. Albert Andrew (A.A.) Ten Eyck inherited the large 600 acre Ten Eyck farm along Pine Bluff on the Sugar River in Green County in the late nineteenth century.

Albert M. Ten Eyck, A.A. Ten Eyck's son, was both an academic and a farmer. He was an assistant professor of Agriculture at the North Dakota Agricultural College in 1897, an Agronomist at the Kansas State Agricultural College in Manhattan, Kansas in 1902 and was the superintendent at the Fort Hayes, Kansas experiment station in 1910. During his time at the experiment station, a small round barn was constructed on the campus for demonstration purposes.

When the Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station and Agricultural College adopted the true round barn form, inherited from Wisconsin, demonstration models were built beginning in 1908 in Champaign, Illinois under the direction of Wilbur Fraser. Fraser’s documentation of the work and the study of the barn’s use in Economy of the Round Dairy Barn had a significant impact on true round barn design. The main argument made by Fraser on behalf of the round barn was its benefits in proportional expenses of construction and maintenance compared to rectangular designs. Fraser went on to outline similar benefits of the round barn form, stating that the true round barn could incorporate a silo, encouraged efficiency of use, used fewer materials, could span large unobstructed spaces, possessed good ventilation, and was easy to use. A.M. Ten Eyck published similar material during his time with the Kansas State Board of Agriculture in various reports, stressing the advantages of the round barn form for dairy barns and the ideal situations of southern Wisconsin and Northern Illinois for such farming practices.

A.M. Ten Eyck resigned from Kansas Experiment Station in 1912 and took a position at Iowa State College in Ames, Iowa. When his father died in 1914, Albert and his family moved to Rockford, Illinois to be near the extended family as he worked as a Winnebago County agricultural agent. In 1918, he took over operations of the Ten Eyck farm in the Town of Spring Grove in Green County, Wisconsin. A.M. Ten Eyck, an active member of the Wisconsin Horticultural Society and the author of a genealogical work on the Ten Eyck family history, died in 1958 at the age of 88. Albert and Minna’s son, Albert Andrew Ten Eyck, took over operations of the farm at that point, and it was subsequently passed on to the current owner of the farm/orchard and Albert Andrew’s son, Robert Ten Eyck, in 1975.

This property is private. Please respect the rights and privacy of the owners.

Property Details

Resources Within The Property

Designations