Dougan Round Barn, Beloit Wisconsin
According to the son of the builder, whose juvenile handprints were embedded in the concrete floor of the barn, the barn was built in 1911 following the concepts of Prof. F. H. King of the University of Wisconsin, who espoused compact, economical construction, reduction of labor and operating costs to obtain the optimum profit for the owner, and adequate light and ventilation for the livestock. Wesson J. Dougan, a young methodist minister, had bought the farm in 1906 from Mrs. S. G. Colley. The original Colley pioneer had been an early settler of the Town of Turtle, and the Colleys had built the older barn, to which the round barn was connected, and the farmhouse.
Mr. Dougan and the carpenter, Mark Keller, arranged the two-by-six rafters out on a field until they developed an "aesthetically pleasing roof shape." The silo, constructed first, was used for support. Years later cross pieces of 2" x 6"s were added to the roof to counteract horizontal shifting of the walls and roof.
The barn was utilized for the Dougan Guernsey Farm, which at one time had a herd of 120 cows. Stone mangers were flush with the feeding floor, and there were wedge-shaped drinking cups. The original floor was plank, until 1930. The first milking machine, an Empire, was installed ca. 1920; pails were made of German silver. Later, a vacuum pump discharged the milk through a pipe under the roadway to the milkhouse vats about 200 feet distant. Grain was ground on the second floor, where the bins were enclosed over the grinder at a later date. The hay track, installed where the barn was new, utilized a motor and jacks to pull the rope of the hay fork. The adjacent older barn was used for horses, then calves.
The dairy operation lasted until 1968; the farm is now being sold under land contract, and a trailer court has grown up around it on the west and north.
Centric barns, though eccentric in the history of American barn building, were promoted in agricultural literature around the turn of the century and were built in some number, from Vermont to California. Rock County retains five of these barns, which though much less publicized than the Clausing centric barns of Ozaukee near the Lake Michigan shore, merit preservation. These five are the only centric barns known to have been built in Rock County. Such barns still exist in neighboring Green (four) and Dane counties. Others, known to have existed in these counties, according to the present Rock County owners have burned or been destroyed.
The Wisconsin dairy industry grew rapidly in the late 19th century. Rock County is situated in the center of the southern Wisconsin dairy belt, being considered by the 1920s to be "one of the Banner Five" counties, in the heart of "America's Dairyland," and for its size stated to be at the head of the list. The number of dairy cows in Rock County almost doubled between 1880 and 1907. This growth was abetted by the encouragement of improved herds of dairy cattle by Hoard's Dairyman, published in nearby Fort Atkinson, by research by the University of Wisconsin Agricultural Experiment Stations, and by the development at the University of Wisconsin in 1890 of the Babcock test to determine the amount of butterfat in milk. An efficient and inexpensive barn construction was sought to house the purebred Guernsey and other herds, as well as the draft horses, needed on the farm. To some extent in Wisconsin and especially in Illinois, centric barns were espoused for their advantages of "convenience, strength and cheapness."
Precedents include the round Shaker barn at Hacock, Mass., of 1826 (rebuilt 1865) with its 3 1/2 foot thick stone walls, its elaborate network of rafters, and central ventilating shaft from barn floor to cupola, which was published in farm journals by the 1880's, and in the writings of Orson Fowler, who promoted the spatial economy and efficient arrangement of octagonal barns in the 1850s. Yet closer sources were the manuals and bulletins put out by the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois, and commercial books as well as periodicals such as The American Agriculturalist, The Country Gentlemen, Hoard's Dairyman, and The Breeders Gazette, Prof. F. H. King (1848-1911) of the University of Wisconsin, who was nationally known for his work on soils and his system of barn ventilation; and who wrote in several farm journals, also designed in 1889 a round barn near Whitewater, "not for novelty but for advantage," which was nationally published. It may also have been locally known to Dean. It was 92 feet in diameter and so larger than the Rock County examples. Yet his precepts and designs were known to have influenced at least Wesson J. Dougan of Beloit.
The Beloit barn used three concentric stone walls (any visible portion is now cement) under the foundations; the published barn used four. King proposed framing with hammer and saw in "the new method", and planned construction around a central silo, which was frame in the older King example and concrete in Dougan's barn. Dougan also placed great emphasis on ventilation; the "auger holes" in the outer walls of the foundation are both designs.? King's round barn was designed to allow "the best performance of the animals", and the best use of labor for profit. Echoes of these slogans were painted onto the silo walls (see: description) by W. J. Dougan on completion of the barn.
With their differences in dimension, date, carpenter, and details of construction, the Rock County centric barns did not seem to influence each other; rather the knowledge of the owner or barn builder must have derived to some extent from some of these publications.
For convenience, all the centric barns tended to include all functions possible within one roof: mow, stable, milking stanchions, silo, and granary. They incorporated the latest developments, often a round silo in the center, 10 some kind of ventilating system, including louvers or a cupola, and conveniences such as a hay track with pulley in the mow and a manure track below. In all the Rock County examples, the ground story plan is centric, with rows of cows facing the center (King and later Dougan pointed out that a cow is wedge-shaped), with a circular aisle for convenience in doing chores. The barn was generally considered "handy to do chores in", though one long-time owner, not the original builder, did not like it, for dairy cattle because he felt the plan involved too much walking around. Sliding barn doors, of vertical siding, conform smoothly to the contour of the round barns or are flat in the octagonal barns.
For strength, the barns seemed superior, The continuous plate of a round barn converted the "lateral thrusts of the roof into vertical loads upon the outside bearing walls". The horizontal siding, like a hoop, holds the barn together, taking "advantage of the lineal, instead of the breaking strength of the lumber. The Risum round barn has withstood the tornadoes of 1911 and 1940 which supposedly below down nearby buildings; yet the Dougan and Gempeler barns once developed torques that were rectified with further bracing.
The Dougan round barn of 1911 is built on the flattest terrain of the five in Rock County. Its mow story is reached by a man-made ramp or "barn bridge," once plank but cemented in 1930. It is the only one without a cupola; the tip of its steep, conical gambreled roof conceals a 50-foot tall poured concrete silo with a ten-foot frame super-structure built to support the roof. White horizontal lapped siding wraps around the 60-foot diameter barn cylinder. Frame covers the ground story as well as the mow story; the low foundations are of concrete. Many windows indicate the concern for light and ventilation: 20 6-over-6 windows on the ground story, nine 6-over-6 windows on the mow story, and four small windows high in the rafters. Six-inch square air ducts are placed between the basement windows, four feet above the ground and just above the foundations, to discharge cold air from below, while two tall wooden shafts on the east and west sides of the silo circulate air to the top of the barn, with upward suction from exhausts on the main floor. Two ventilators project from the roof.
The ground story has a circular concrete floor with drain and 20 metal stanchions. There are five ground-story exits. One on the southwest is a passage to an older, 19th-century barn of hand-hewn construction sided with flush vertical frame, on limestone foundations, which show repairs by Mr. Ron Dougan. Cows entered through a ten-foot-long steep gabled wind on the west, passing under a burlap flap to remove flies, which were ingeniously discharged into a wooden cage and disposed of. Other exits lead to a concrete yard to the north.
The mow interior is dominated by the silo, 12 feet in diameter, and the open space around it. Though a portion of the northwest was later walled off as a separate grain storage room, it is still an impressive space, The rafters rise above the studs in three segments, converging from about two feet apart at the plate to about 6 inches apart at the juncture with the silo. The rafters of the central segment are double, wrapping around the segments above and below; the hay track is suspended from this portion. Added bracing connects with the silo. The following motto was painted on the walls of the silo by the owner:
The Aim of This Farm:
1. Good Crops
2. Proper Storage
3. Profitable Live Stock
4. A Stable Market
5. Life as well as a Living
W. J. Dougan
