Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
powered by steam traction machines. It was shortly after this introduction
of hay-baling technology that was capable of producing uniform, brick-like
bales that the first straw-bale houses were constructed in the Sand Hills of
Nebraska. Though the terms “hay” and “straw” were defined less precisely
during this period than at present, before the introduction of the hay baler
only hay was of any value. Straw, the left-over stalk with no grain head, was
usually burned as a waste product.
THE EARLY HISTORY OF STRAW-BALE BUILDING IN NEBRASKA
The Sand Hills of Nebraska, a region that produced impressive stands of
meadow hay, is where the first straw-bale buildings were constructed.
Nebraska pioneers of the late 1800s were poor people. Their plains envi-
ronment was short on timber, and if they had used much of the sod of the
western Sand Hills to build sod buildings they would have used up their
topsoil. Building with straw bales was easier than building with sod because
their larger size facilitated more rapid wall construction and larger struc-
tures. Moreover, the folklorist Roger Welsch proposes that by this time the
specialized plows for cutting sod and the oxen needed to pull them effi-
ciently were no longer in use, the tools and the skills both being rusty.
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Though pioneers sometimes built small sod structures to establish their land
claims, sometimes they also built larger straw-bale houses as inexpensive
second dwellings.Though cereal grains were not yet being cultivated in the
1880s, natural meadow grass was available. Oral tradition suggests that a
hay-bale home was constructed near Lincoln as early as 1889; however, the
earliest actual documentation for a straw-bale structure is a 1902 report by
Nebraska State Superintendent of Schools William K. Fowler of a one-
room schoolhouse built near Minitare (then called Tabor):
Some five or six years ago in district No. 5 of Scotts Bluff County there was erected
a temple of learning, the walls of which were of baled straw, the floor was the prim-
itive mother earth and the roof above presented a face of earth to the heavens.This
roof was made of poles laid across from side to side and covered with sod. The
building was sixteen feet long, twelve feet wide, and seven feet high. There was a
window in each side and a door in one end. The bales of straw were laid in mud
instead of mortar, and with some half bales the joints were broken the same way
that bricks are laid. . . . The building was used but two years as a schoolhouse....
Like the temple of ancient Jerusalem, of that schoolhouse there is not left one stone
or bale of straw upon another, as the cattle were allowed to range around it.
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