Strawbale - History

Straw has had a key role throughout the history of construction. Straw is composed of essentially the same materials as wood, is durable and inert provided is doesn't remain damp, and has excellent insulating properties as well.
Throughout history, straw has most commonly been used as a roofing material or as a mixture of straw and mud in a wide array of earth-to-straw ratios. Straw provides tensile reinforcement for earth mixes such as adobe and cob. Leichtlehm (“light clay” in German) is composed mostly of straw with clay serving as a binder and coating. Between these two ends of the spectrum are a range of earth plasters that include chopped straw. Cow dung is another example of the world’s most common plasters, and is in essence composed of straw that has been "processed" by the cow.
It would be safer to say, then, that straw bale construction is a rediscovery of a building material that has been in use as long as people have been building.  Construction with straw may have fallen out of favor during the industrial revolution, but it is in the midst of a hearty comeback via a new vernacular.

1920's Nebraska Style

The mechanical baler was created in the mid-1800s in response to the need to store and transport hay and straw. The resulting lightweight, oversized "bricks" were seen as a useful building material, as shown by the many U.S. patents applications from this era. Bale walls remained in use only by isolated individuals, except in one instance that created an actual straw bale tradition.
After people began homesteading the area known as the sand hills of Nebraska around 1914, their choice of building materials was severely limited. Lumber was expensive and largely unavailable locally, and the sod was too thin and precious to building with. Horse powered balers were available, so between 1896 and 1945 as many as 70 straw bale buildings were put up in the area, 13 of which were still in existence as of 1993.
Bob Theis visited the Faun Lake Ranch in Nebraska, whose straw bale structures date from 1928. He was able to extract a few straws through a crack in the interior plaster of one of the buildings. He reported that the straws were still flexible, still strong in tension, indistinguishable, in fact, from straw pull from a bale harvested this year.

Bale Building Resurgence

One of these historic Nebraska straw bale buildings was published in the 1973 book, Shelter, written by Roger Welsh. It appears that this book was the inspiration behind a number of initial "revival" straw bale buildings. In 1983, Fine Homebuilding featured John Hammond's straw bale studio, sparking still more interest. Continued interest in straw bale construction was the impetus for the founding of a quarterly newsletter called The Last Straw in 1993 by Matts Myhrman and Judy Knox. By the mid 1990s, interest and use of straw bale construction was well on its way to bringing this building technique to the mainstream.