If you’re looking for a cost-effective way to build your garage, shop, barn, office, or home, look no farther than WBC’s Montana pole barns. Featuring cost-effectiveness, construction speed, durability, flexibility, energy efficiency and compatibility with WBC Building Components, pole barns could be your ticket to a strong, affordable building.

Pole barn construction (pouring a concrete pier foundation, setting the posts or poles, adding horizontal girts, and installing [usually metal] roof and siding) is both fast and strong. It’s still flexible, though – it can accommodate a range of colors, doors, roof styles, wainscot, and doors.

The History of Pole Barns

Pole barns were first developed in the 1930s out of necessity. The Great Depression made money tight, but the skills, time, and hardwood trees needed for the ancient art of timber framing were long gone, or, in places like the Great Plains, had never existed.

Electric utility poles and industrially produced corrugated steel sheeting, however, provided a cheap source of building materials. Farmers and other rural dwellers buried the poles in the ground, covered the walls and roof with metal sheeting, and had a strong, inexpensive building with far fewer materials and less labor. The use of utility poles gave the building type its name.

After World War 2, the utility poles were soon replaced by solid sawn posts, ranging from 4×6 to 6×8. The posts were chemically treated to prevent rot and insect damage, a major advantage over untreated poles. Shortly afterward, in the ’50s and ’60s, A. Carroll Sanford developed metal-plate connector roof trusses, allowing greater spans, eventually up to 100′. Then, in the ’70s and ’80s, dimensional lumber posts had a new competitor in glue-laminated beams and posts made of 2x6s and 2x8s. Since the ’80s, pole barns expanded out of the agricultural sector and into commercial (and even residential) use. Improvements were also made to the foundation – wide holes with the posts embedded in concrete replaced poles buried in the ground. Finally, log and timber screws and pneumatic nails replaced the old ring-shank pole barn nails, improving speed and holding power.

As noted above, square or rectangular posts also enabled many more siding and roofing options – metal, plywood, board and batten, asphalt shingles and stone.

After over 80 years of improvements, pole barns remain a cost-effective way to build a utilitarian, no-nonsense building in a short amount of time.

Build Your Montana Pole Barn

WBC has all the materials you need to build a pole barns: poles or posts, concrete pier foundations, roof trusses, metal siding/roofing, pole barn nails, overhead doors, and everything else you need to build.

Ready to build? Check out our [button link=”https://westernbuildingcenter.com/pole-barns/”]Pole Barns[/button] page to learn more and visit your local WBC store to start.

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