I drive past this weird building a few times per year when life takes me dow that stretch of road.
Any idea what this is about? For context, it’s down the road from Caledonia, Missouri, a nothingburger town in the Ozark Mountains in Missouri. It’s near or adjacent to a farm supply company that may or may not be in business (times are hard in Iron County).
Why would anyone build an approximately 10’x10’ building, and put it about 4 feet above the ground? At a guess I’d say it has to do with storing things that mustn’t get wet, but there are ways to ensure that without building the building so high.
Hórreos look much nicer, the old traditional ones may even be protected, but the idea is the same. Raise the building, store things inside that won’t get wet when flooded and animals will have it hard to get there. No idea whether that’s it, but the elements are there.
The junk yard on the back looks agricutural too.
That they do. I’m curious as to why one would build a similar structure in the modern era. Surely modern building techniques are sufficient to keep out moisture and vermin, no?
I suspect not, at least not as affordably. Building methodologies are mostly about money. A concrete floor might seem more modern than a raised wooden floor, but the damed things can still get damp, and if you need to keep rain out, you are looking at all around water proof walls and a water proof entrance, plus the need to manage the bonding of walls to floor. And you need it to stay that way without constant oversight.
Your average mouse can get in via a hole smaller than your thumb, and rats will eat though nearly anything short of concrete or steel. Critters will get in via the most absurd routes. Stopping the wretched things getting even a foothold on your structure is a win.
A modern take on a raised building is almost certainly another raised building. You might swap in steel for wood, or maybe concrete piers, but you probably won’t be saving any money. At least not up-front.
Certainly where I am, if asked to provide a storage building like this, I would be reaching for a steel construction on steel piers on concrete footings. (We do a good line in termites, so whilst wood is viable, it needs serious chemical warfare to survive long.)
I would guess that there used to be something else (scales for incoming/outgoing vehicles, inspection station, loading/unloading equipment) adjacent to that structure for which that was the office or interior workstation. Our local dump/recycling center has a similar structure next to the scales that all vehicles have to cross both coming and going to determine what fees (if any) need to be charged.
Those concrete piers don’t look rat proof to me. But like you say, every bit helps.
Reminds me, once I was backpacking in the desert southwest and stumbled across an abandoned cowboy shack. Inside was a table that someone had slid inverted tin cans (with holes in the bottom) over the legs to act as rat gaskets. The table top was covered in rat pellets.
Where I lived in MO lots of farmland is prone to periodic flooding. Any building that wasn’t raised, either on a mound or short stilts, was going to be inundated every few years.
Maybe that building was an ordinary farm shed when built. And all the other buildings around it have fallen down or been knocked down since?
If newer buildings nearby are built on ground level, which seems to be the case, perhaps flood control there has been improved since whenever the old building was built.
Point being what’s unique about that building is its history and survival, not its function.
I’d be surprised if it was, indeed, a corn crib. One of the key features of a corn crib is the ample ventilation, which this structure seems to lack. The walls of this structure look to be air tight, and there are glass-paned windows on at least two sides (as evidenced by being able to see sky on the other side of the building through the windows on the right side).
This all depends on the land its built on right , and total cost.
You might think, just put a waterproof membrane down and put concrete on that. But cheap concrete floors break,especially since its on clay, and if the ground freezes.
or anyway, this way they can clear snow away from the floor if the snow is building up.
Nitpick: “staddle” not “saddle”. The word “staddle” has a variety of meanings, many obsolete, and most having to do with something supporting something else. Interestingly, one of the meanings describes the OP’s building quite well: “A building of timber standing on legs or steddles, to raise it out of the mud” (OED).
The name of the village of Staddle in The Lord of the Rings is derived from this word.
My first thought was “chicken house”, but really lots of building used to be raised up a couple of feet off the dirt. That one only has 4 poles, it might just be there was no point in lopping a couple of feet off the bottom.