With stones carefully selected for tight binding, little mortar was needed to build this stone round barn and with two feet thick walls, the expert fitted stonework resisted water, wind and weather. And with the strong winds creating below zero wind chills overnight, a warm snug barn would nice especially back in the days when cattle filled the barn.
The Annala Round Barn
As the Montreal River, which forms the border for parts of Upper Michigan and Wisconsin, drops in elevation on its way to Lake Superior, it cascades over several waterfalls. This 20 foot waterfall is called Interstate Falls, with Peterson Falls slightly upstream, and with Saxon and Superior Falls downstream.
The Wisconsin side of the falls is currently up for sale, and although it has been private land, public public access has been allowed along the foot trail to the falls and river. But this could change and there is no public access on the Michigan side to see the falls so I’m glad I saw it when I did even if wasn’t in the best lighting conditions at the time but the sunlight did catch the mist rising from the falls and sparkles on the water closer to shore.
Interstate Falls
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, round barns were promoted as an efficient design, with feed for a dairy herd stored in the middle and cows spread out around it. Round barns were not easy to expand for increasing herds and the mechanization of American agriculture was more suited to rectangular barn design so the round style was never as popular as the traditional style and few remain across the county and all stone construction are a rare find, which only one listed in Wisconsin.
Matthew Annala, a Finnish carpenter and stone mason, had a small dairy farm south of Hurley, Wisconsin, where he built a 24 inch thick stone round barn which took five years to complete with the help of some of his sons and neighbors. Only a little mortar was used since they relied on the mason’s skill of fitting the multi-colored stones together for a tight binding. The barn was completed in 1921 and continued to be a dairy barn and deliver milk to the region until 1973.
In 1979, Matthew Annala’s barn earned a listing on the National Register of Historic Places. A paragraph from the petition states, “The Annala Round Barn and Milkhouse…is significant for its design, its excellence in craftsmanship, and its associations with the area’s early Finnish settlement and with private dairy farming in Iron County.”
Annala Round Barn and Milkhouse
