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Growing up on Muddy Creek
The Day the Silo 'Busted'
By Perry Piper
Dad was building a new barn after the old barn and silos were destroyed in a disastrous fire caused by lightning. The year was 1920 there on the banks of Muddy Creek.
Dad had decided to make the new barn as fireproof as possible. He contracted with George and John Moore, well-known carpenters in Lukin Township, to erect forms and build the barn of poured concrete.
They had just completed erecting the 50-foot-tall, all-concrete silo, the tallest manmade structure in the area, when silo-filling time arrived.
Dad figured this might well be a problem too. So, since the feed room was not yet built, he decided to set the blower right under the chute and run the discharge pipe up through it to the 42-foot level. The Trimble boys north of Robinson had proven that their silo could be filled at that height using the same power source, so Dad figured this was a good first goal.
Filling silos in those long ago days was a far cry from filling them today. Field choppers were unknown, and in fact, corn binders with their mechanical cutting and bundling of the stalks, were still in the experimental stage. As a result, most of the corn for silage was cut by hand using brute strength and awkwardness.
The editor of Hoard's Dairyman, an early advocate of corn silage, was recommending that corn be cut for silage just as it passed the roastingear stage. The leaves were still green and the stalks full of sap and heavy.
The stalks were cut with a corn knife, a machete-like instrument with a very sharp, two-foot-long blade. About a dozen stalks were gathered into the crook of the left arm, the knife then swung, cutting off the stalk about four inches above the ground.
Cut stalks were laid together in a heap for later collection by two men with a team and wagon. One man picked up the piles and handed them to the other, on the wagon rack. His job was to "build" a load of the stalks, which were then hauled to the silo.
There, two more men would feed the stalks into the chopper. The whole process was certainly not labor efficient.