Ryan Round Barn

Six miles north of Kewanee, inside what is now Johnson-Sauk Trail State Park, stands a barn that looks like no other in the county. The Ryan Round Barn was completed in nineteen ten for Laurence Ryan, a prominent Chicago brain surgeon who grew up in Kewanee and bought three hundred twenty acres here as a rural retreat. A German immigrant craftsman is credited with building it.

The result is about seventy-four feet across and sixty-one feet tall. Round barns were briefly fashionable in the Midwest on the theory that circular walls resisted tornado winds and let a single farmer work efficiently from the center outward. When it was added to the National Register of Historic Places on December thirty-first, nineteen seventy-four, it became the first round barn in Illinois to earn that designation, a monument to an agricultural experiment that rarely outlasted its builders.