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Kelly McEvers: This episode is for the DIY nation. The people who see something they like and say, “I can make that.” People like Marcia and Dave Johnson. Their farm in Windsor, Illinois, is filled with DIY projects. The house…
Marcia Johnson: The house is modeled after one in Williamsburg, Virginia. We found the house plan at the back of a magazine.
Kelly: The gate…
Marcia: The gate that you enter is a copy of King George VI’s gate in England.
Kelly: The musical stones in the garden…
Marcia: They are like an outdoor xylophone, but they’re made out of granite, and they actually can be played. You take a little marimba stick out there, and it makes a different sound depending on which one.
Kelly: And this one feature that has actually become a tourist attraction.
Marcia: When you come up the driveway, you don’t see it. And so then I bring people around this very large oak tree, and they see it for the first time, and they’re amazed because it’s much bigger than they expected, I think.
Kelly: This big thing she’s talking about is a tower, almost like a fairy-tale tower, tall and spindly with a pointy roof. There’s this ramp thing that winds its way around the tower all the way up to the top.
Marcia: And so the very first thing I do is have them sit on a little bench with the tower in the background under a sign that says Bienvenue, meaning “welcome.”
Kelly: The sign is in French, not for the visitors, but for the goats.
I’m Kelly McEvers and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. And today’s episode is brought to you in partnership with Enjoy Illinois.
And today, Dave and Marcia Johnson are going to introduce us to their goat tower, the Tower of Baa-Goat, which is inhabited by a flock of goats who speak French—Swiss French to be exact. We’ll talk about 19th-century architectural follies and why goats like to climb and how sometimes household projects take on a life of their own.
That’s after this.
This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Kelly: When Dave and Marcia Johnson were building their house, the one inspired by a building in Colonial Williamsburg, they happened to have some bricks left over. And for them, a pile of unused bricks is an opportunity, the start of a new potential project. One day, when Dave was reading a magazine…
Marcia: Decanter magazine, which is a wine magazine out of the UK, did a feature article on Charles Back at the Fairview Winery in South Africa, and so that’s where my husband saw the picture of the goat tower.
Kelly: This, of course, is Marcia Johnson. She’s a retired school teacher. Dave is a retired crop insurance salesman. The Fairview Winery goat tower in the magazine looked like a tower from a fairy tale. Or maybe if you live on a farm in central Illinois, a grain silo with a big ramp that spirals up around the outside of it.
Charles Back had built this tower on his vineyard in South Africa because he also had a herd of goats for making cheese, and the tower was meant as a jungle gym for them.
Marcia: These are Saanen goats that live in the tower, and Saanen goats originate from the Saanen region of Switzerland. I think that might be why they like to climb. They’re just automatic climbers. They see the tower, they go up it.
Kelly: These Saanen goats from the Alps had been domesticated for milk production.
Marcia: They’re actually called “Queen of the Milkers” because they give such prolific milk and such delicious milk.
Kelly: The Fairview winery in South Africa was inspired by an even older goat tower from the 1800s at a winery in Portugal. That one was built as a kind of architectural folly. Or an interesting building with no real purpose other than just to be interesting. Or, as the family behind that vineyard put it, an artistic daydream with no functional explanation. In any case, Dave was smitten.
Marcia: He was intrigued by it, and he, I think, he was just always thinking about different unique things that could be done. So, yeah, he was the idea guy, and then I’m the maintenance person.
Kelly: I should point out that the Johnsons did not actually have any goats at this time—like at all. Still, Dave pushed ahead. This was back in the late ’90s.
Marcia: And he saw the picture of the Fairview Winery, and he showed it to the bricklayer, and the bricklayer said, “Oh yeah, I could do that.” He was a master bricklayer who had come out of retirement just to do this, because I guess he was intrigued by it. In fact, he said to Dave, “You’re the craziest guy I’ve ever known.”
So anyway, it was in the works before I knew anything about it. I was off, working. And they got this all planned out and got it started. The only thing I got to say was where to put it, which was outside my kitchen window. So I measured 50 feet outside my kitchen window, and that’s where they built the tower.
Kelly: But unlike the design of their house, which had plans they got from a magazine, there were no plans for the goat tower. So Dave improvised. He and the bricklayer used the photograph from the magazine and worked backwards. They designed a tower that essentially had floors with little compartments on each floor that the goats could hang out in. But the actual measurements required a lot of guesswork, because, again, they were working off a photograph.
Marcia: Well, they got the scale wrong. The diameter is about a foot bigger, and by the time they got to the four compartments that the Fairview winery has, it was out of proportion. It was too squat looking, so they had to do one more complete wrap, making it the world’s largest goat tower by mistake.
Kelly: We’re talking now about a tower that’s 31 feet tall with a diameter of 7.5 feet. So this is like the height of a two- or three-story building.
Marcia: And then they had to order another load of brick ’cause they ran out of brick, and the whole point was to use up the brick that was left over. So, they ordered another load of brick, and that was no small thing because those are handmade brick in North Carolina. So they got another shipment, finished the tower, they got the whole thing done in three months.
Kelly: Now that Marcia and Dave had a goat tower. The next thing they needed was goats. They chose Saanen goats from Switzerland, naturally, just like the Fairview winery. And when the goats got there, they went straight for the tower.
Marcia: They were in it just about instantly, and we had quite a few babies born on the place. We’ve had over 100 goats over the years, and one of the little boys, two days old, climbed all the way to the top of the tower, and then he got up there and he cried because it was easy to go up, but it’s hard to come down.
So Dave went out and he went up the tower. It was funny because the mother was standing below the tower, kind of like, Well, what are you gonna do now that you’re up there? So Dave went and he carried him down, and then the next day the little guy did the same thing, went way up, and then cried because, again, he didn’t want to come down. So Dave went up and made him walk in front of him, and then he got it, and then he couldn’t keep the little guy down.
So sometimes the goats will be up in their compartments, or sometimes they’ll just plunk themselves down on the stairs that go over the end of the spiral stairs that go around it. So yeah, they like to be out looking from above, I think.
Kelly: Word got around about this goat tower on the Johnson’s farm. It started with some local newspaper articles, then it was picked up in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Their farm in central Illinois is about a two-hour drive from St. Louis. And from there, it just kept spreading.
Marcia: We even ended up on the local phone book, which was ironic because it was a phone book for Findlay, and we’re actually in Windsor, but they put our goat tower on the Findlay phone book. So yeah, it got around and it’s been since the ’90s.
Kelly: Soon, the goat tower became a full-on attraction.
Marcia: It’s just a way or something that people can spend about 40 minutes out of their day to come and see something different, very un–central Illinois, as I would say.
Kelly: And according to Dave and Marcia, the goats seem to enjoy the attention.
Marcia: They love visitors. Sometimes it takes them a little bit to decide that they’re going to come out of the tower, but once they come down, then they love to be petted and made over, and yes, they’re, they’re friendly goats. They are friendly goats.
Kelly: If you would like to visit the Tower of Baa-Goat, head over to their website, goattowerfarm.com, and drop Marcia a line to get a full tour. We will post a link in the episode description.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Sirius XM podcasts. This episode was produced by Amanda McGowan. The production team for this episode includes Dylan Thuras, Doug Baldinger, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Jerome Campbell, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tyndall.
