Fromme-Birney Round Barn

Henry W. Fromme, a German immigrant whose family farmed this ground from 1885, hired a local carpenter, William "Pat" Campbell, in 1912 to build a barn for 28 draft horses and a box stall for a registered Percheron stallion named Bouquet that he had brought from France. Round barns were sold to farmers as stronger against wind, more efficient inside and cheaper in lumber for the volume they held. This one cost about $8,000, several thousand more than an ordinary barn. It is not round but sixteen-sided, 50 feet tall and 70 feet across, under a domed double-pitch roof and a sixteen-sided cupola.

Campbell cut every rafter by hand, working out the angles with a framing square so that 160 two-by-sixes met at the cupola. A sixteen-sided granary stands at the center of the ground floor, circled by a wagon way, with trapezoidal stalls along the outer wall and Bouquet's heavy stall first on the left as you enter. The Frommes bought their first tractor in 1916, and the barn went to hay. Its silhouette later served as a landmark for training bomber navigators in the Second World War.

The Birney family bought the farm in the 1950s. In the 1980s Lawrence Birney gave the barn and an acre to his wife Phyllis for their fifteenth anniversary; she had it listed on the National Register in 1987 and gave it to the Kiowa County Historical Society in 1993, which restored it in 1995. Inside are displays on round barns and farm life in 1912.