Drying House

on single-family peasant farms, a wooden-framed structure in which sheaves of rye, wheat, oats, barley, and other grains were dried before threshing. Flax and hemp were also dried in such structures. Heat from a stove or from an open fire in a pit in the ground dried the materials. In the upper part of the drying house, the sheaves were placed on horizontal poles. In prerevolutionary Russia, drying houses were widely used in the northern and middle regions owing to primitive threshing methods. On kolkhozes and sovkhozes the need for such structures has been eliminated with the advent of grain-harvesting combines.