Stilwell’s Round Barn
Built to last “a thousand years,“ the Raymond P. Brinkman barn east of Stilwell is a rare historic building from the early 20th century.
In 1911 Raymond and Ruth Brinkman left an affluent life in Kansas City, Missouri, to try farming acres of land from the pioneer Case family, built a house on the south side of the Stilwell-Ocheltree road, established “Sweetbriar Farm.” In 1968, at the age of 87, Brinkman admitted that “when we came, we were tenderfeet. Neither of us knew the difference between a pitchfork and a threshing machine. But we got it in our heads that farm life would be wonderful.”
The Brinkmans constructed a round horse barn in 1912 on the north side of the road. It costs $1,600 and was built in fourteen days by John C. Long's crew, the same crew that built the R.A. Long residence (now the Kansas City Museum). The barn is 48 feet in diameter and 33 feet high. The conical roof was covered with 35,000 shingles. The interior of the barn has twelve stalls. The hay loft had a mechanical hay fork and an elevator to hoist oats and corn to second-floor bins with chutes distributing the grain to the feeding floor. When the high stone walls began to fail in the 1930s, Brinkman had them reconstructed in 1940.
Brinkman found the plans for a round barn in a farm magazine in 1911. As he said, “I liked the idea of a central work area surrounded by stalls. I used it for a horse barn. At one time we had 24 Percheron horses.” Sweetbriar Farm was primarily a livestock farm where the Brinkmans raised purebred Shorthorn cattle and Hampshire sheep. In the 1920s the farm was a showplace with many visitors from Kansas City. Mr. Brinkman gave up active management of the farm in 1939 and rented the property for several years. He sold the land where the the barn stands to James and Stella Ragan in 1947. Later, the tract was platted in 1979 as Sweetbriar Estates.
Now the round barn is vacant and threatened by neglect. Although the roof is deteriorated and the walls are unpainted, the barn still retains its historic architectural integrity.
--ALBUM vol. 7, no. 4 (fall 1994)