Miller Brothers Pole Buildings

Miller Brothers Pole Buildings has been putting up post frame buildings out of Richmond since 1994, when Amos Miller and his brother Levi took on their first machine shed for a neighbor on Salisbury Road. The shop is Amish owned and still run by the same family. Two of Amos’s sons now head up the framing crews, and a nephew handles the layout and material orders.

The bulk of their work is agricultural and shop buildings in the 30 by 40 to 60 by 120 range: machinery storage, grain and hay buildings, insulated work shops, garages, and horse barns. They also take on lean to additions onto existing barns, which is work a lot of larger outfits will not bother with. In a normal year they finish somewhere between forty and fifty buildings, and they keep two crews running from March through December.

They are known in the county for how they set posts. Miller Brothers uses laminated columns set on precast concrete footings rather than a single treated post in the ground, and they will explain the reason to anyone who asks: the laminated column keeps the untreated wood up out of the soil, and the footing spreads the load so the building does not settle unevenly on the heavy clay that runs through this part of Indiana. It costs a little more at the start. It is the difference between a building that stands straight in thirty years and one that does not.

For roofing and siding they favor 29 gauge steel with a painted finish, and they will push a customer toward a screw down panel for an equipment building and a standing seam for a house or a barn that faces the road. They stock trusses from a mill in Berne and prefer to order long lengths rather than lap panels partway up a wall, which means fewer seams to leak later. If a customer asks for a cheaper material they will quote it, but they will tell you plainly where it will give you trouble.

Amos handles most of the estimating himself and will come out to walk a site before quoting anything. He does not use a computer, so a quote comes back as a written page in the mail or as a phone call, usually within a week of the site visit. Crews start early, keep the site picked up, and haul their own scrap out. They do not work Sundays, and they will tell you up front if they cannot get to your job before the ground freezes rather than take a deposit and leave you waiting.