Bob and Kathy Frydenlund have been in love with their round barn ever since they bought their place in the town of Erin Prairie about a dozen miles east of New Richmond. The couple want to restore the nearly century-old structure to its original condition. That will take a good bit of cash, however.
In an attempt to raise funds, the Frydenlunds once held annual harvest festivals on their farm. They now raise and sell llamas, too, calling their business “Lladies ‘n Llads of the Round Barn.”
But the Frydenlunds are really hoping that some of the necessary funds for remodeling the barn will come from book publishing and a Web site that they maintain for round barn owners and lovers alike.
In April of this year, Bob and Kathy finished work on “The Original Round Barn Building Plan Book.” It is the product of years of research. The Frydenlunds combed the archives of the University of Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station and came across a series of bulletins written between 1910 and 1912.
The author, Wilbur J. Fraser, took many pains to describe in detail the process of erecting a round structure surrounding (in most cases) a central silo, where feed grains are stored.
“I assure you, the standard round dairy barns are not hard to erect, and any good builder, with this (set of instructions), can erect one without difficulty,” Fraser wrote with great confidence in the forward to his original publication. “There is really less difficult framing to do in connection with the round barn than in building rectangular barns of truss or braced rafters construction,” he added.
Fraser received a letter from a Wisconsin dairy farmer who said “The Round Barn is getting to be quite a thing out here in Wisconsin, its future seems bright, indeed.”
The Frydenlunds also put some of their research on the Internet. They maintain a Web site entitled www.roundbarn.homestead.com
Using instructions he found on the site, a round barn owner in Prairie Farm (southwestern Barron County) invested about $40,000 in a cement bloc round barn on his farm. The most difficult part was the roof. The owner discovered he could use standard, manufactured trusses anchored to the central silo (built of handsome, glazed brick) to rebuild the roof.
The electronic journey into “round-barning” continues for the Frydenlunds, who have discovered about 30 round barns in their travels around northwestern Wisconsin.
Their Web site offers driving instructions to all of the round barns, located as far north as Douglas County (not far from Lake Superior) and as far south as Pepin and Buffalo counties on the south, where a treasure trove of eight round barns await the traveler.
