By Rafe Calder
Every 12 to 16 kilometres, the Canadian Encyclopedia says, a wooden tower rose beside the tracks. That spacing is the whole logic of the prairie skyline.
Before the tower
Grain used to move in bags. According to Wikipedia, Joseph Dart Jr., a merchant, and Robert Dunbar, an engineer, built the first mechanical elevator in Buffalo, New York. It went into operation on 1 June 1843 and worked almost seven times faster than the methods it replaced. Bulk handling had begun.
In Canada, the Canadian Encyclopedia says, William Hespeler built a wooden, silo-like structure at Niverville, Manitoba, in 1879. The country elevator followed from there.
How one works
The machinery is simple and the building is tall. A belt with cups or scoops, called the leg, gives the elevator its vertical shape. Grain trucks dump into a receiving pit, and the leg lifts the grain to a distributor, which sends it down into a chosen storage bin. For shipping, the grain drops to a back pit, is lifted again, weighed on a hopper scale and run through a car spout into a railway car.
The standard elevator held 25,000 bushels, the encyclopedia says, and later ones held 30,000 to 40,000. Heights were typically 24 metres or higher. Wikipedia describes the country style as wooden cribbing with nine or more larger square or rectangular bins. Metal cladding came later. Building one took a dozen men a month or more.
Why twelve to sixteen
Wikipedia says elevators were placed to serve farmers within an economical hauling distance. The railway set the line, and the hauling distance set the gap.
The farmers take a hand
The Grain Growers’ Grain Company, later United Grain Growers, formed around 1906, according to the encyclopedia, followed by farmer co-operatives in Saskatchewan and Alberta. Provincial wheat pools in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta were in place by 1924. One of the five elevators at Inglis, described below, was operated by United Grain Growers, which the federal register calls a producer co-operative.
The count
The encyclopedia says there were as many as 5,758 elevators in 1933. Wikipedia gives Alberta alone 1,642 country elevators in 1961, holding 3,452,240 tonnes of grain. The same article says that by 2010 only 79 primary elevators remained, holding 1,613,960 tonnes. That passage follows its Alberta figures, and we have not confirmed whether the 2010 count is for Alberta alone.
The encyclopedia says rail deregulation and the abandonment of branch lines sped up closures, and notes that the Crow Rate ended in 1996. Wikipedia says that in the mid-1990s private elevator companies had to merge, and that thousands of what it calls prairie sentinels were torn down. The same article dates the modern concrete elevator to 1899, with the Peavey-Haglin experimental elevator in St. Louis Park, Minnesota.
Five in a row at Inglis
Inglis, Manitoba, kept its row. The federal register says five wooden country elevators stand beside a railway spur running south from Inglis, built between 1920 and 1925 and in 1941, with the five on the west side of the track. Three operators owned them: United Grain Growers, N.M. Paterson and Company, and Reliance Grain Company with National Grain Company. Each stands 20 to 25 metres tall and holds 16 to 20 bins. The encyclopedia’s typical figure is 24 metres or higher, and we are reporting both without reconciling them.
The register describes cribbed construction from dimensional lumber, with overlapping ends spiked together, set on concrete foundations and clad in wooden shiplap siding. Inside, the grain-handling machinery is intact: endless-cup conveyors, distributor spouts, hopper scales and gravity-fed metal spouts. The site was designated on 25 January 1999. The register calls it Canada’s best and Manitoba’s only surviving collection of early twentieth-century grain storage and shipping facilities at one rural loading point.
Reading the object
The register says the row was positioned competitively at one rural loading point, and that three different operators owned its five elevators. Competition and co-operation sit side by side in the same row.
What to ask
If you meet a maker who says they use salvaged elevator timber, ask which elevator the wood came from, where it stood, when it came down, and what records show it. Ask what it was treated with. Our sources do not discuss reclaimed elevator wood, so we are not naming a maker or making any claim about it.
Roam first. Shop later.
If you make goods from prairie materials, the process for getting listed is at /sell-with-sephari/