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.