4 Straw Bale Fort
During the 1950-57 period in my life there were many things to entertain me on the farm in Berthoud Colorado. One was using the rectangular 40 pound bales of straw as building blocks to create walls and rooms. The bales were about four feet long, two and a half feet wide, two feet high and tied with binder twine. Friends from the neighborhood and I stacked, alternating and over lapping the bales (like giant bricks) so that they would structurally hold together in a large rectangular fortress of hundreds of bales. Normally these were stored until they were needed for winter bedding for the cattle. The straw had very little value and sometimes it would sit for years before being used. That gave us kids a lot of time for creativity as we discovered that the bales could be stacked in many different ways. We made them into walls enclosing open rooms and tunnels in the middle of the straw stack. What looked like a normal stack of bales became a three dimensional maze of tunnels.
Straw bale demo showing over lapping bales with passage way between. Photo by Rick Bein 2020.
We found that a great fort could be made by placing the bales around the top perimeter of the stack. We learned to stabilize them by overlapping and periodically crossing them with perpendicular bales. Inside the fort, we created tunnels that we could crawl through and, with the help of some long boards, we created some larger rooms. What looked like a normal straw bale stack became a three-dimensional maze of tunnels.
Siblings and Friends from town would come out and we would play hide and seek inside the maze. One kid who came out from town was afraid to go in. Eventually, when he did go into one of the tunnels, we decided to switch a few bales around, blocking his way out. We kept him prisoner for about fifteen minutes, but I imagine we terrorized him enough that his claustrophobia never did go away! We would bring the cats and dogs into the arena enclosed by the bales. We created little rooms where would keep them. This was fun, but became a bit cruel when we forgot a cat, trapped for a week in the straw bale rooms.
Myself in the hat, Jeanie above, and friend playing on the straw pile fortress. Photo by Jean H. Bein 1950.
Then when Dad finally sold the straw, the workers that came to load it onto a truck found the stack to be a giant booby trap. When they picked up a bale they expected to be walking on top of more bales, but instead they inadvertently fell into the cavity below. Ultimately one crew of workers refused to carry any more bales after tumbling into the hidden rooms with the bale he was carrying coming down on top of him.
Dad was furious and decided that I was the culprit and made me re-arrange the straw bales in a proper manner. Then he had to find another buyer.