During a round barn building boom in South Dakota, Alfred and Marit Christensen, together with relatives and neighbors, built a round dairy barn one-third mile northeast of this site. Forty round barns were built in the state between 1903 and 1921. Workers made hundreds of concrete blocks from sand and clay found on the farmstead, using special forms to create blocks that resembled hand-quarried stone. An interior silo was built first, and then concrete block walls were raised around it to form the barn, topped by a self-supporting, dome-shaped, two-pitch gambrel roof. In these unusual barns, dairy cows stood in a circle facing the silo for milking and feeding, and they were promoted as more efficient, stronger, and as much as 58 percent cheaper to build than rectangular barns. Alfred, born in 1871 in a sod house near present-day Renner, South Dakota, and Marit, born in 1874, a widow who emigrated from Meraker, Norway, with her three children, had nine more children after their 1905 marriage.