Plumes of smoke mixed with the clouds Wednesday after a fire consumed a hay barn in Newport during the early morning hours.

The Kilbourn Fire Department was paged around 3 a.m. to a fully-engulfed structure fire at N8861 New Haven Road, Chief Tory Wolfram said.

When firefighters arrived, most of the building had already collapsed, he said.

The building was a three-sided tin barn, three-quarters full of hay feed and corn stalks used for cow bedding, owner Otto Christopherson said.

Chistopherson’s son, Olaf, lives in the farm house next to the barn, but wasn’t home Wednesday night when the fire started. He was at his parents house up the road, Otto said.

“(The fire) was in the shed,” Otto said. “They wouldn’t have noticed it anyways until it was burning.”

Kilbourn Fire responded with two engines and two tankers. Portage Fire and Briggsville Fire responded with an additional two tankers and one engine to fight the fire, Wolfram said.

Kathleen Davis, a Newport resident and friend of the Christopherson family, said she saw the flames in the sky as she was driving down Highway 16 on her way home from work Wednesday morning.

Her brother, Chris, had just gotten home from cutting hay, and went to the Christopherson farm to move tractor equipment so the firefighters could get closer to the fire, Chris said.

He said he “could see an orange glow” against the silos as he drove from Peterson Road to the fire on New Haven Road.

“We,” Chris said of himself and his family, “went up there because we thought it was the cow barn on fire.”

The cows were fine, however, and did not suffer any ill affects from the fire or the smoke, Otto said.

According to Wolfram, a spontaneous combustion of the wet and the dry hay in the barn was the cause of the fire.

“It’s the composting process that creates heat and starts fires,” he said.

Otto said the barn was built in the 1980s and was one of the newest barns the family had. Now, it is a pile of twisted metal and burnt hay.

After extinguishing most of the fire, Royal Excavating came in with a back hoe and removed the metal debris from the wreckage so the firefighters could completely extinguish the fire, Wolfram said.

The fire department did not leave the farm until about 9:30 a.m.

Otto said the family will have to rebuild the leveled barn, and isn’t sure yet what his insurance will cover.

“We have some other hay we can use to feed the cows,” Otto said. “We are going to miss (the corn stalks) more than anything.”

Between the feed and the barn, Wolfram said the fire caused about $45,000 in damage.