Baled Hay Construction

The revival the plaque mentions began with a folklorist. Roger Welsch's 1970 article "Sandhill Baled-Hay Construction" in Keystone Folklore Quarterly, and his pieces in the alternative publication Shelter in 1973, carried the Sandhills method to builders far from Nebraska; by the 1990s bale walls, by then called the Nebraska style, were spreading back from the Southwest. The first documented bale building in the state was a schoolhouse of 1896 or 1897, left unplastered and unfenced, and reported in 1902 to have been eaten by cows. Plastering, with gumbo mud where lime was scarce, came after.

What the plaque says

Baled Hay Construction The invention of mechanical balers in the mid-1800s led to the use of bales of hay or straw as building blocks. Pioneer builders developed structural bale walls using cuttings of either native prairie flora— baled-hay—or of agricultural waste, known as straw- bales. Most of the historical bale buildings were constructed during the Kinkaid Homestead era, between 1904 and 1935, and mostly in the Sandhills. Bales were stacked like giant bricks to create structural walls like those of sod buildings. Blocks were often set in mud or concrete mortar, with rods used to pin the bales together. After a period of settling, buildings were fitted with chicken wire and plastered with clay, lime, or cement. Sturdy beyond expectation, properly built and maintained structures have an indefinite life span. Fewer than 100 are known from the historical period in Nebraska. Pilgrim Holiness Church is the only known church built of baled hay. These "Nebraska Style" buildings inspired a modern resurgence of bale construction. Since the 1970s thousands of bale buildings have been built worldwide, including many in Nebraska and the American Southwest. Arthur County Historical Society Nebraska State Historical Society, 2018

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Pilgrim Holiness Church (Baled Hay Church) — steps away
  A church raised in 1928 from bales of hand-tied rye straw in treeless Arthur, the oldest known straw-bale church in North America and a survivor of a Sandhills building habit.
• Ash Hollow State Historical Park — 29 mi
  The emigrants' spring below Windlass Hill, six miles from the Blue Water Creek camp where Harney's soldiers killed eighty-six Lakota in 1855, and where their belongings came home in 2025.

More markers nearby

• Ash Hollow Geology — 29 mi
• Ash Hollow — 29 mi
• Windlass Hill Pioneer Homestead — 30 mi