The Old Corn Crib

From pioneer days until well into the 1950's, most farmers dried and stored ear corn in ventilated outbuildings known as corncribs. Corn "on the ear" could be dried easier and kept longer than shelled corn.

When I was a little girl there was a corncrib on our farm. I loved playing in it. It had a roof, a concrete floor, an alleyway through the middle, and the sides were constructed with horizontal wooden slats.

Ken Starek is a member of the Iowa Barn Foundation and has photographed agricultural architecture for 40-years, including many types of corncribs.

"Most cribs are horizontal, you will find a few that are diagonal," he says. "If you find one with vertical cribbing, normally that is a very old corncrib and I don't know why it was done that way. Horizontal or diagonal seems to be the most popular, and I can see why horizontal because it would shed the rain the best."

He says it was the two-row corn picker that brought the corncrib into its glory, until technology took over.

"You stood out in the weather in late-November, early-December, and you picked corn," says Starek. "In the late 60's, picker-sheller units came and that was the start of the end of picking ear corn, and the beginning of drying bins."

Combines and the need to mechanically dry shelled corn has rendered the corncrib obsolete. No longer needed, most of these buildings have collapsed or been torn down.