Thanks to Darren Zink (Strategic Accounts Manager at Brock Grain Systems), I will be speaking at the annual educational convention of the Great Lakes chapter of the Grain Elevator and Processing Society to be held at Pokagon State Park in Angola, Indiana, on Thursday, April 7, 2011. See you there?
Showing posts with label speaking engagements. Show all posts
Showing posts with label speaking engagements. Show all posts
Monday, January 17, 2011
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Feedback on presentation at GEAPS 2010
Audience response:
We had 65 attendees, 94% completed the evaluation.
How would you rate the quality of this session overall?
Excellent 34%
Good 57%
Fair 8%
Poor 0%
How interesting was the session?
Very 70%
Somewhat 30%
Not at all 0%
How useful will it be at work?
Very 16&
Somewhat 37%
Not at all 46%
Was the session?
Too tech 1%
Not enough 10%
Just Right 89%
To what degree did it improve your understanding?
Very 36%
Somewhat 52%
Not at all 12%
How would you rate your speaker?
Excellent 41%
Good 52%
Fair 7%
Poor 0%
Should GEAPS offer this as a webinar?
Yes 32%
No 62%
Comments:
Good history of the industry.
Very interesting session, no operations benefit, but fun to learn about the history of the industry.
Very interesting historical background.
We had 65 attendees, 94% completed the evaluation.
How would you rate the quality of this session overall?
Excellent 34%
Good 57%
Fair 8%
Poor 0%
How interesting was the session?
Very 70%
Somewhat 30%
Not at all 0%
How useful will it be at work?
Very 16&
Somewhat 37%
Not at all 46%
Was the session?
Too tech 1%
Not enough 10%
Just Right 89%
To what degree did it improve your understanding?
Very 36%
Somewhat 52%
Not at all 12%
How would you rate your speaker?
Excellent 41%
Good 52%
Fair 7%
Poor 0%
Should GEAPS offer this as a webinar?
Yes 32%
No 62%
Comments:
Good history of the industry.
Very interesting session, no operations benefit, but fun to learn about the history of the industry.
Very interesting historical background.
Text of presentation at GEAPS 2010 Wichita, Kansas
The History of the Grain Elevator
by William J. Brown
I was born in a place where a huge grain elevator stood and, indeed, still stands. The elevator was built back in the 1920s. As a child, I used to see it often, riding in my parents' car on the way to Grandma's house. Many years later, I went to graduate school in a place where there were (and still are) over a dozen grain elevators, one or two of which are among the most active facilities in the USA. I became fascinated by grain elevators, and spent several years reading about them, looking at old pictures of them, exploring the abandoned elevators and getting guided tours of the ones that were still working. Eventually, I wrote American Colossus, which is a book about the history of the American grain elevator between 1843 and 1943.
Now, without reading any more, you might assume that I was born and went to graduate school somewhere on the prairies, in the American Midwest or Canada. Certainly somewhere in or near the great wheat/corn/soybean belt that is the geographical center of our great nation and this extraordinary continent. But in fact I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and went to graduate school in Buffalo, New York. If you are surprised by this -- and clearly I am hoping that you are -- it is probably because Brooklyn and Buffalo are big cities, not small towns or villages, and because both cities are centers of industry, not agriculture. To give this hoped-for surprise a voice: "What would a city boy know about grain elevators?"
Now, generally speaking, city boys and girls know very little or nothing about grain elevators; indeed, the very words "grain elevators" are often foreign to their ears. And this is because city folks on the West, East and Gulf coasts of the USA live at the terminals of the torrential streams that bring hundreds of millions of bushels of grain (and all of the many products that are derived from it) from farms in small towns in the American Midwest to supermarkets, bakeries, liquor stores and gasoline stations everywhere else. By the time all or any of that grain has reached the city folks, the grain elevators have already done their work, and so they escape notice. Of course, there are grain elevators in the big cities (port cities, especially), but these facilities generally ship grain overseas, and so the average big-city coast-dweller doesn't know or doesn't need to know what those huge, odd-looking buildings are, or how they fit into the international "grain stream."
OK, so I'm "unusual" for a city boy: I know all about grain elevators; in fact I wrote "the book" about them! Humorous though it might be, this little pleasantry isn't the real punch-line of my story. My real punch-line is the fact that the grain elevator itself was invented in a major city (in Buffalo, New York, as a matter of fact), and not in a rural town. Despite our expectations, the grain elevator was invented more than 160 years ago in an urban transshipping hub and in the middle of the grain stream, and not at the beginning or the "well-spring" of that stream. How and why did this happen?
Technically speaking, the first grain elevators -- that is to say, the first steam-powered bucketed conveyor-belts -- were used by Oliver Evans, an inventor and businessman in Maryland who started using them in his flour mills in the mid-1780s. The idea was both simple and brilliant. Evans could have used the new invention (the wood-burning steam engine) to move grain to and from the millstones on horizontal belts, which would have required his flour mills to be big and wide enough to encompass all that machinery. Instead, Evans used his conveyor belts to "elevate" the grain vertically, to the top of the mill, from which the force of gravity alone was needed to conduct the grain down to the millstones and then down from the millstones to the barrels in which the flour was sealed. Not only did Evans' top-down flour mills function much more rapidly and efficiently than "traditional" mills (which were powered by water currents, the wind, or teams of horses), but they also didn't take up as much space as their predecessors. They were tall buildings, not wide ones, and thus well-suited for locations near water (rivers, lakes or oceans), where the demand for space is always much higher than elsewhere.
In 1865, looking back on the history of the invention that he claimed was his, and his alone, the Buffalo-based merchant Joseph Dart, Jr. was paradoxically explicit in his debt to Oliver Evans. In his address to the Buffalo and Erie Historical Society (BECHS), Dart stated: "Indeed, the building I then erected [in 1843] may perhaps be called the parent, not only of the Bennett Elevator [built in 1863 on the site previously occupied by the Dart Elevator], but of all others; for I believe it was the first steam transfer and storage Elevator in the world. It was the first Elevator in the world. It was the first successful application of the valuable invention of Oliver Evans to the commercial purpose for which it is now extensively employed."
For Dart, who had been out of the grain business for years before the historic elevator that bore his name burned down, this acknowledgment of Oliver Evans had two purposes. Dart not only wanted to help historians trace the history of the invention that, by 1865, had transformed Buffalo into the biggest grain port in the world. He also wanted to lobby in favor of granting a patent for the device called "the grain elevator" to one Joseph Dart, Jr., of Buffalo, New York. Oliver Evans had been awarded a patent, and so should Joseph Dart, Jr., too, because "an inventor's merit consists not merely in conceiving an idea of a machine, but also in overcoming the practical difficulties of its successful operation [...] It is worthy of remark that some of the most useful inventions have not been discoveries of new principles or methods of mechanical action, but new applications of methods and principles already known."
But Dart was never granted a patent for the "grain transfer and storage elevator." One can easily see why. Despite his claim to personally "overcoming the practical difficulties of [the elevator's] successful operation," Dart's address to the BECHS contains nothing about the construction, mechanics or day-to-day functioning of "his" grain elevator. The people who really knew about these subjects were Robert Dunbar, the mechanical engineer who both designed and built the Dart Elevator, the Bennett Elevator, and many others in Buffalo and elsewhere in the USA, and William Wells, the superintendent of the Dart Elevator and several others in Buffalo.
Far from being without interest, Dart's self-serving address to the BECHS is full of information about the rapid increase in the grain trade through Buffalo between 1831, when the first grain-bearing brig arrived from Chicago, and 1845, when the Dart Elevator was doubled in size and capacity to accommodate the ever-rising demand for "transfer and storage" services in that city. Why was Buffalo so important? Because of its unique geographical location: at the eastern end of Lake Erie, and thus reachable from anywhere on the Great Lakes, which is the single biggest system of lakes in the world; and at the western end of the Erie Canal, and thus reachable from Albany (and points east, such as Boston), the Hudson River and New York's Harbor. Completed in 1825, the Erie Canal was, at first, an east-to-west route for immigrants, pioneers and settlers who were heading out to Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Soon afterwards, and thanks to the great productivity of the farms in the new "West," the Erie Canal became a two-way conduit: people and manufactured goods traveling from East to West; but also grain (flour in barrels, and wheat in sealed sacks) being shipped from West to East, that is to say, from farm to market.
An in-land port city, Buffalo also had a problem. The vessels that navigated the Great Lakes were too large to sail through the Erie Canal, and the boats that traveled the Erie Canal were too small to sail on the Great Lakes. And so, the grain that came into Buffalo had to be transshipped, that is, unpacked from the lakers, temporarily stored on the docks, and then packed up into the canal boats. As late as 1842, this transshipping was accomplished by the oldest and most labor-intensive of technologies: a block-and-tackle, and teams of stevedores, who would do most of the carrying of the barrels and sacks on their very backs. It was a very slow process, and often times required as much as a week to transship a single shipment of grain (approximately 3,000 bushels). But by 1842, when Buffalo began to receive a million bushels of grain from in-coming lakers, it was clear that this method had become obsolete. The answer, certainly, lay in mechanizing the transshipping process, just as agriculture had been mechanized by such inventions as Cyrus McCormick's steam-powered reaper (1831), the Pitt Brothers' steam-powered thresher (1834) and John Deer's steel-tipped plow (1837).
Here Joseph Dart, Jr. had no choice but to turn to Robert Dunbar, who had been working on the problem in nearby Black Rock, New York. A trained mechanical engineer, Dunbar had tried water mills to power his elevators. (A miller from Black Rock named Mahlon Kingman had tried teams of horses.) But these were only experiments. Over the winter of 1842-1843, Dunbar -- working under the auspices of Joseph Dart, Jr. but using his own designs, his own iron foundry and his own hands -- constructed what came to be known as the world's first "marine tower." Called marine because it faced the water (Buffalo Creek), this tower was a tall, thin box made of heavy wood timbers. Inside of it, the conveyor-belt was stored horizontally, just as the elevators at Evans' flour mills were. Powered by a wood-burning steam engine and enclosed in its own wooden tube, the elevating device was called a leg because, when lowered out of the marine tower, the apparatus appeared to "step" out, down and into the hull of the grain ship that was docked in front of it. The buckets that were attached to the conveyor belt (later called "Buffalo buckets") could each store a quart of grain. Dunbar did some experimenting before he finally got the number and spacing of the buckets right. When the leg was lowered into a ship's hull, these buckets bit into the piles of grain in bulk stored therein, and elevated it to the top of the marine tower, where the grain was expelled from the "leg" and collected separately. Because it had been elevated in this fashion, the grain could then be sent -- using nothing but the force of gravity -- to a canal boat, which was docked underneath the structure, or to the top of the "mainhouse" of the elevator, where the grain was stored temporarily in tall, rectangular bins. When it was needed, the stored grain was conducted by gravity down from the bottom of the bin into a "boot," from which the grain was then elevated by another steam-powered leg (called a "lofting leg" or simply a "lofter" to distinguish it from the marine leg) to the top of the tower. From the tower, the grain was then conveyed by gravity down into a canal boat or horse-driven wagon, depending on who the ultimate purchaser was. (Later, with the coming of the railroads, the marine tower could also dispatch grain into a shed and the cars of the trains that had pulled into it.)
On 12 June 1843, the Dart Elevator serviced its first vessel, the schooner Philadelphia, which brought 4,515 bushels of grain in bulk from Chicago. A cheap but remarkably indirect route, which took as long as a month to complete: all the way up Lake Michigan, all the way down Lake Huron, and then all the way across Lake Erie! The grain from Chicago was transshipped from the Philadelphia to canal boat in a single day, which was almost seven times faster than a "traditional" grain warehouse could manage. Over the course of the 1843 shipping season, the Dart successfully unloaded a total of 229,260 bushels of grain from more than 70 different vessels. Indeed, the Dart was so successful that, just two years after its opening, its storage capacity was doubled (a total of 110,000 bushels) and a second marine tower was added. It was clear: Buffalo's transshipping problems could be solved if another half-dozen of these elevators were built there. Together, they could easily accommodate the millions of bushels that the Port of Buffalo was receiving every year. By 1852, Buffalo's harbor was indeed filled with such elevators, as well as floaters (grain elevators placed on small ships) and transfer towers (elevators without storage bins accompanying them).
But the grain elevator was not an invention that was adopted immediately and universally. Indeed, it wasn't until 1846 that other grain elevators were built in Buffalo, and it wasn't until 1847 that "Buffalo-style" grain elevators were built outside of that city. What accounts for the delay? It seems there were a great many factors, including the costs of construction, the difficulty of obtaining credit, the absence of plans or designs for constructing a good grain elevator, the limited demand for grain in bulk, the different ideas of what a "bushel" meant, the resistance in the local community to "time-saving devices" that put people out of work, the absence of a local flour-milling industry, and the uncertainty and chaotic nature of the grain trade itself (no telegraph lines, no "to arrive" contracts, no futures markets, no standardized grain-grades, etc). In fact, it was only in the 1850s that the basic conditions for the widespread adoption of the transcontinental grain elevator system were finally met. The key development was the universal adoption of the switch-over from shipping grain in sealed, burlap sacks to shipping grain in bulk. Once this switch-over was accomplished, grain elevators weren't merely helpful in dealing with exceptions (shipments that weren't in sacks or shipments of grain other than wheat); they were necessary for conducting business on an everyday basis.
The beginnings of the interlinked grain elevator system of today can be seen in the locations of the world's second and third steam-powered grain elevators, which were constructed by Robert Dunbar in 1847 in Toledo, Ohio, and Brooklyn, New York. The line that stretched from Toledo to Buffalo to Brooklyn moved grain along an all-water route from the interior of the country to one of its primary coastal marketplaces. Along this line, the grain had to be transshipped three times: from horse-driven wagon or canal boat to lake vessel at Toledo; from laker to canal boat at Buffalo; and from canal boat to wagon, rail car or ocean-going vessel at Brooklyn. In time, this line would be extended west to Chicago, Illinois, where a steam-powered elevator was built in 1848, and east to Oswego, New York, where one was built in 1851.
Thanks to this interlinked system of grain elevators, America was able to develop its enormous agricultural potential. Grain that was grown for profit could now be transported more easily, more cheaply and much further than ever before. These advances in transportation meant greater profits for both grain growers and grain dealers. Greater profits in turn meant that more land could purchased and turned into farmland, and more and bigger markets for grain products could be constructed. Both enterprises required human labor, which meant that more people would be able to move "out west" and find jobs . . . as grain-growers, grain-transporters or grain-dealers. As a result, more grain was grown and . . . the cycle began anew. And so let us say, in word: America had grain, but it was the grain elevator that turned that grain into power: grain power.
It was through the British that American grain elevators came to dominate the transshipping practices of the world. Because it had long nourished itself on bread made from wheat, and because it was becoming increasingly dependent on American wheat after the abolition of its Corn Laws in 1846, England was one of the first countries to start switching-over from grain shipped in sealed sacks to grain shipped in bulk. It appears that the first American-style grain elevators to be used in England were floaters: one of them was in fact towed clear across the Atlantic Ocean in the 1880s. Once in England, this elevator was studied and copied by British engineers, who began building their own floaters. Thereafter, the "American Elevator," as it was known, was sold off to the Belgians, who successfully used it in their harbors. Around 1905, floating elevators were first introduced in Holland. But it wasn't until the 1910s, when reinforced concrete became the primary material out of which grain bins were made, that huge land-based elevators were built in Western Europe, Russia and India. At first, their bins were shaped like rectangles, not cylinders. Eventually, or rather, after ravages of World War II, truly American-style elevators (cylindrical silos and all) were built in Europe and elsewhere in the world.
Between 1843 and, say, 1943, grain elevators in America underwent several significant changes. With the change-over from wood to coal as the source of fuel, the steam engines inside these elevators became more powerful and the machines they powered became even faster and more efficient. Storage capacities grew from around 100,000 bushels to nearly a million bushels per elevator. Another major change-over came at the end of the 1890s, when the availability of electrification brought about the obsolescence of the steam engine. To answer the challenge of this new, "cleaner" and more-modern form of energy, and to take advantage of the lowered insurance rates that were offered to operators of electrified grain elevators, designers and builders experimented with a number of building materials other than wood and iron: tile, steel, and reinforced concrete. As a result of all this experimentation, grain elevators -- or, rather, the buildings that enclosed them, as well as the buildings that stored the grain -- began to look very different from the Dart Elevator and the ones that were built in the 19th century. The chief difference was the visual appearance of the grain bins: they were no longer stored within a larger structure (the "mainhouse"), but instead stood alone, on their own.
During and after World War II, the construction and technology of grain elevators changed once again. At some grain elevators, the storage bins were no longer compartments, as they had been since the time of the Dart Elevator, but single rooms capable of storing a million bushels each. At other grain elevators, the machines were no longer housed in buildings of their own, but were -- like the grain tanks they serviced -- freestanding structures, fully visible to the eyes of passers-by. At still other elevators, external conveyor-belts were no longer necessary, because some sailing vessels had machines aboard that did the unloading themselves. Indeed, some "grain elevators" were no longer grain elevators, but grain blowers (or grain suckers, if you prefer): machines that transship piles of grain in bulk by vacuum cleaners and pneumatic tubes, not buckets and belts.
Generally speaking, the old American classics of the 1843 to 1943 era have been destroyed, either to make room for newer facilities or to simply remove a troublesome eyesore or "attractive nuisance," as the lawyers say. In some places, especially in small rural communities with a strong sense of municipal pride, the old classics (the "country elevators") have been turned into museums. In other places, the old classics of the reinforced-concrete variety have been transformed into climbing gyms, planetaria, hotels, and condominiums. Paradoxically, it is only in poor communities -- places like Chicago, Cincinnati and Buffalo -- that classic elevators still stand, but only because they haven't been demolished yet, not because they have been "saved" from demolition.
Quite obviously, we can learn from a great deal from the past. In the course of my research, I have compiled this list of "lessons" that might be useful for the future.
1). In America, the order of development has not the same as it was in Europe, where the rural village existed long before before the big city. In America, the small town and the big city were built at the same time. A "big city" could spout up anywhere, even in the middle of the wilderness. Likewise, big cities collapse and end up looking like wildernesses again.
2). Unlike the production of grain, the grain trade doesn't necessary originate with or even follow the contours of the land. Generally speaking, the grain trade follows the opportunities offered by current business conditions. And so, the grain trade can embrace or abandon a place -- even the very same place -- with equal rapidity and coldness once an opportunity arises.
3). Though the "givens" of the natural environment play a large role in determining the success or failure of a local enterprise, one shouldn't forget that the natural environment can be modified, sometimes quite substantially. And so the question isn't, "Who has access to the best resources?" but "Who can imagine how those resources could be put to use?"
4). There is no such thing as a "pure" invention. All inventions are built upon the work of others. There is certainly something "original" in an invention, but it lies in its imaginative use of something else, something that pre-exists it. This suggests that there are no solitary inventors, no "isolated geniuses," and that inventions are always the work of a team of individuals (at least two of them).
5). The beginnings of modern industry, globalization and other apparently contemporary phenomena are much earlier than we might believe. They all seem to start in the 1840s, not later (the 1880s, the 1920s, or the 1940s). This might help us today, when it global capitalism is undergoing its worst crisis since the 1930s.
6). Despite the widespread notion that most industries strive to produce just enough "quality" or "excellence" to survive, but never strive to produce real excellence for its own sake, many of the grain elevators of the classic period were truly excellent architecture. They were very well-built, and they were very striking to look at, even if the viewer couldn't decide if they were spectacularly beautiful or spectacularly ugly.
by William J. Brown
I was born in a place where a huge grain elevator stood and, indeed, still stands. The elevator was built back in the 1920s. As a child, I used to see it often, riding in my parents' car on the way to Grandma's house. Many years later, I went to graduate school in a place where there were (and still are) over a dozen grain elevators, one or two of which are among the most active facilities in the USA. I became fascinated by grain elevators, and spent several years reading about them, looking at old pictures of them, exploring the abandoned elevators and getting guided tours of the ones that were still working. Eventually, I wrote American Colossus, which is a book about the history of the American grain elevator between 1843 and 1943.
Now, without reading any more, you might assume that I was born and went to graduate school somewhere on the prairies, in the American Midwest or Canada. Certainly somewhere in or near the great wheat/corn/soybean belt that is the geographical center of our great nation and this extraordinary continent. But in fact I was born in Brooklyn, New York, and went to graduate school in Buffalo, New York. If you are surprised by this -- and clearly I am hoping that you are -- it is probably because Brooklyn and Buffalo are big cities, not small towns or villages, and because both cities are centers of industry, not agriculture. To give this hoped-for surprise a voice: "What would a city boy know about grain elevators?"
Now, generally speaking, city boys and girls know very little or nothing about grain elevators; indeed, the very words "grain elevators" are often foreign to their ears. And this is because city folks on the West, East and Gulf coasts of the USA live at the terminals of the torrential streams that bring hundreds of millions of bushels of grain (and all of the many products that are derived from it) from farms in small towns in the American Midwest to supermarkets, bakeries, liquor stores and gasoline stations everywhere else. By the time all or any of that grain has reached the city folks, the grain elevators have already done their work, and so they escape notice. Of course, there are grain elevators in the big cities (port cities, especially), but these facilities generally ship grain overseas, and so the average big-city coast-dweller doesn't know or doesn't need to know what those huge, odd-looking buildings are, or how they fit into the international "grain stream."
OK, so I'm "unusual" for a city boy: I know all about grain elevators; in fact I wrote "the book" about them! Humorous though it might be, this little pleasantry isn't the real punch-line of my story. My real punch-line is the fact that the grain elevator itself was invented in a major city (in Buffalo, New York, as a matter of fact), and not in a rural town. Despite our expectations, the grain elevator was invented more than 160 years ago in an urban transshipping hub and in the middle of the grain stream, and not at the beginning or the "well-spring" of that stream. How and why did this happen?
Technically speaking, the first grain elevators -- that is to say, the first steam-powered bucketed conveyor-belts -- were used by Oliver Evans, an inventor and businessman in Maryland who started using them in his flour mills in the mid-1780s. The idea was both simple and brilliant. Evans could have used the new invention (the wood-burning steam engine) to move grain to and from the millstones on horizontal belts, which would have required his flour mills to be big and wide enough to encompass all that machinery. Instead, Evans used his conveyor belts to "elevate" the grain vertically, to the top of the mill, from which the force of gravity alone was needed to conduct the grain down to the millstones and then down from the millstones to the barrels in which the flour was sealed. Not only did Evans' top-down flour mills function much more rapidly and efficiently than "traditional" mills (which were powered by water currents, the wind, or teams of horses), but they also didn't take up as much space as their predecessors. They were tall buildings, not wide ones, and thus well-suited for locations near water (rivers, lakes or oceans), where the demand for space is always much higher than elsewhere.
In 1865, looking back on the history of the invention that he claimed was his, and his alone, the Buffalo-based merchant Joseph Dart, Jr. was paradoxically explicit in his debt to Oliver Evans. In his address to the Buffalo and Erie Historical Society (BECHS), Dart stated: "Indeed, the building I then erected [in 1843] may perhaps be called the parent, not only of the Bennett Elevator [built in 1863 on the site previously occupied by the Dart Elevator], but of all others; for I believe it was the first steam transfer and storage Elevator in the world. It was the first Elevator in the world. It was the first successful application of the valuable invention of Oliver Evans to the commercial purpose for which it is now extensively employed."
For Dart, who had been out of the grain business for years before the historic elevator that bore his name burned down, this acknowledgment of Oliver Evans had two purposes. Dart not only wanted to help historians trace the history of the invention that, by 1865, had transformed Buffalo into the biggest grain port in the world. He also wanted to lobby in favor of granting a patent for the device called "the grain elevator" to one Joseph Dart, Jr., of Buffalo, New York. Oliver Evans had been awarded a patent, and so should Joseph Dart, Jr., too, because "an inventor's merit consists not merely in conceiving an idea of a machine, but also in overcoming the practical difficulties of its successful operation [...] It is worthy of remark that some of the most useful inventions have not been discoveries of new principles or methods of mechanical action, but new applications of methods and principles already known."
But Dart was never granted a patent for the "grain transfer and storage elevator." One can easily see why. Despite his claim to personally "overcoming the practical difficulties of [the elevator's] successful operation," Dart's address to the BECHS contains nothing about the construction, mechanics or day-to-day functioning of "his" grain elevator. The people who really knew about these subjects were Robert Dunbar, the mechanical engineer who both designed and built the Dart Elevator, the Bennett Elevator, and many others in Buffalo and elsewhere in the USA, and William Wells, the superintendent of the Dart Elevator and several others in Buffalo.
Far from being without interest, Dart's self-serving address to the BECHS is full of information about the rapid increase in the grain trade through Buffalo between 1831, when the first grain-bearing brig arrived from Chicago, and 1845, when the Dart Elevator was doubled in size and capacity to accommodate the ever-rising demand for "transfer and storage" services in that city. Why was Buffalo so important? Because of its unique geographical location: at the eastern end of Lake Erie, and thus reachable from anywhere on the Great Lakes, which is the single biggest system of lakes in the world; and at the western end of the Erie Canal, and thus reachable from Albany (and points east, such as Boston), the Hudson River and New York's Harbor. Completed in 1825, the Erie Canal was, at first, an east-to-west route for immigrants, pioneers and settlers who were heading out to Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Soon afterwards, and thanks to the great productivity of the farms in the new "West," the Erie Canal became a two-way conduit: people and manufactured goods traveling from East to West; but also grain (flour in barrels, and wheat in sealed sacks) being shipped from West to East, that is to say, from farm to market.
An in-land port city, Buffalo also had a problem. The vessels that navigated the Great Lakes were too large to sail through the Erie Canal, and the boats that traveled the Erie Canal were too small to sail on the Great Lakes. And so, the grain that came into Buffalo had to be transshipped, that is, unpacked from the lakers, temporarily stored on the docks, and then packed up into the canal boats. As late as 1842, this transshipping was accomplished by the oldest and most labor-intensive of technologies: a block-and-tackle, and teams of stevedores, who would do most of the carrying of the barrels and sacks on their very backs. It was a very slow process, and often times required as much as a week to transship a single shipment of grain (approximately 3,000 bushels). But by 1842, when Buffalo began to receive a million bushels of grain from in-coming lakers, it was clear that this method had become obsolete. The answer, certainly, lay in mechanizing the transshipping process, just as agriculture had been mechanized by such inventions as Cyrus McCormick's steam-powered reaper (1831), the Pitt Brothers' steam-powered thresher (1834) and John Deer's steel-tipped plow (1837).
Here Joseph Dart, Jr. had no choice but to turn to Robert Dunbar, who had been working on the problem in nearby Black Rock, New York. A trained mechanical engineer, Dunbar had tried water mills to power his elevators. (A miller from Black Rock named Mahlon Kingman had tried teams of horses.) But these were only experiments. Over the winter of 1842-1843, Dunbar -- working under the auspices of Joseph Dart, Jr. but using his own designs, his own iron foundry and his own hands -- constructed what came to be known as the world's first "marine tower." Called marine because it faced the water (Buffalo Creek), this tower was a tall, thin box made of heavy wood timbers. Inside of it, the conveyor-belt was stored horizontally, just as the elevators at Evans' flour mills were. Powered by a wood-burning steam engine and enclosed in its own wooden tube, the elevating device was called a leg because, when lowered out of the marine tower, the apparatus appeared to "step" out, down and into the hull of the grain ship that was docked in front of it. The buckets that were attached to the conveyor belt (later called "Buffalo buckets") could each store a quart of grain. Dunbar did some experimenting before he finally got the number and spacing of the buckets right. When the leg was lowered into a ship's hull, these buckets bit into the piles of grain in bulk stored therein, and elevated it to the top of the marine tower, where the grain was expelled from the "leg" and collected separately. Because it had been elevated in this fashion, the grain could then be sent -- using nothing but the force of gravity -- to a canal boat, which was docked underneath the structure, or to the top of the "mainhouse" of the elevator, where the grain was stored temporarily in tall, rectangular bins. When it was needed, the stored grain was conducted by gravity down from the bottom of the bin into a "boot," from which the grain was then elevated by another steam-powered leg (called a "lofting leg" or simply a "lofter" to distinguish it from the marine leg) to the top of the tower. From the tower, the grain was then conveyed by gravity down into a canal boat or horse-driven wagon, depending on who the ultimate purchaser was. (Later, with the coming of the railroads, the marine tower could also dispatch grain into a shed and the cars of the trains that had pulled into it.)
On 12 June 1843, the Dart Elevator serviced its first vessel, the schooner Philadelphia, which brought 4,515 bushels of grain in bulk from Chicago. A cheap but remarkably indirect route, which took as long as a month to complete: all the way up Lake Michigan, all the way down Lake Huron, and then all the way across Lake Erie! The grain from Chicago was transshipped from the Philadelphia to canal boat in a single day, which was almost seven times faster than a "traditional" grain warehouse could manage. Over the course of the 1843 shipping season, the Dart successfully unloaded a total of 229,260 bushels of grain from more than 70 different vessels. Indeed, the Dart was so successful that, just two years after its opening, its storage capacity was doubled (a total of 110,000 bushels) and a second marine tower was added. It was clear: Buffalo's transshipping problems could be solved if another half-dozen of these elevators were built there. Together, they could easily accommodate the millions of bushels that the Port of Buffalo was receiving every year. By 1852, Buffalo's harbor was indeed filled with such elevators, as well as floaters (grain elevators placed on small ships) and transfer towers (elevators without storage bins accompanying them).
But the grain elevator was not an invention that was adopted immediately and universally. Indeed, it wasn't until 1846 that other grain elevators were built in Buffalo, and it wasn't until 1847 that "Buffalo-style" grain elevators were built outside of that city. What accounts for the delay? It seems there were a great many factors, including the costs of construction, the difficulty of obtaining credit, the absence of plans or designs for constructing a good grain elevator, the limited demand for grain in bulk, the different ideas of what a "bushel" meant, the resistance in the local community to "time-saving devices" that put people out of work, the absence of a local flour-milling industry, and the uncertainty and chaotic nature of the grain trade itself (no telegraph lines, no "to arrive" contracts, no futures markets, no standardized grain-grades, etc). In fact, it was only in the 1850s that the basic conditions for the widespread adoption of the transcontinental grain elevator system were finally met. The key development was the universal adoption of the switch-over from shipping grain in sealed, burlap sacks to shipping grain in bulk. Once this switch-over was accomplished, grain elevators weren't merely helpful in dealing with exceptions (shipments that weren't in sacks or shipments of grain other than wheat); they were necessary for conducting business on an everyday basis.
The beginnings of the interlinked grain elevator system of today can be seen in the locations of the world's second and third steam-powered grain elevators, which were constructed by Robert Dunbar in 1847 in Toledo, Ohio, and Brooklyn, New York. The line that stretched from Toledo to Buffalo to Brooklyn moved grain along an all-water route from the interior of the country to one of its primary coastal marketplaces. Along this line, the grain had to be transshipped three times: from horse-driven wagon or canal boat to lake vessel at Toledo; from laker to canal boat at Buffalo; and from canal boat to wagon, rail car or ocean-going vessel at Brooklyn. In time, this line would be extended west to Chicago, Illinois, where a steam-powered elevator was built in 1848, and east to Oswego, New York, where one was built in 1851.
Thanks to this interlinked system of grain elevators, America was able to develop its enormous agricultural potential. Grain that was grown for profit could now be transported more easily, more cheaply and much further than ever before. These advances in transportation meant greater profits for both grain growers and grain dealers. Greater profits in turn meant that more land could purchased and turned into farmland, and more and bigger markets for grain products could be constructed. Both enterprises required human labor, which meant that more people would be able to move "out west" and find jobs . . . as grain-growers, grain-transporters or grain-dealers. As a result, more grain was grown and . . . the cycle began anew. And so let us say, in word: America had grain, but it was the grain elevator that turned that grain into power: grain power.
It was through the British that American grain elevators came to dominate the transshipping practices of the world. Because it had long nourished itself on bread made from wheat, and because it was becoming increasingly dependent on American wheat after the abolition of its Corn Laws in 1846, England was one of the first countries to start switching-over from grain shipped in sealed sacks to grain shipped in bulk. It appears that the first American-style grain elevators to be used in England were floaters: one of them was in fact towed clear across the Atlantic Ocean in the 1880s. Once in England, this elevator was studied and copied by British engineers, who began building their own floaters. Thereafter, the "American Elevator," as it was known, was sold off to the Belgians, who successfully used it in their harbors. Around 1905, floating elevators were first introduced in Holland. But it wasn't until the 1910s, when reinforced concrete became the primary material out of which grain bins were made, that huge land-based elevators were built in Western Europe, Russia and India. At first, their bins were shaped like rectangles, not cylinders. Eventually, or rather, after ravages of World War II, truly American-style elevators (cylindrical silos and all) were built in Europe and elsewhere in the world.
Between 1843 and, say, 1943, grain elevators in America underwent several significant changes. With the change-over from wood to coal as the source of fuel, the steam engines inside these elevators became more powerful and the machines they powered became even faster and more efficient. Storage capacities grew from around 100,000 bushels to nearly a million bushels per elevator. Another major change-over came at the end of the 1890s, when the availability of electrification brought about the obsolescence of the steam engine. To answer the challenge of this new, "cleaner" and more-modern form of energy, and to take advantage of the lowered insurance rates that were offered to operators of electrified grain elevators, designers and builders experimented with a number of building materials other than wood and iron: tile, steel, and reinforced concrete. As a result of all this experimentation, grain elevators -- or, rather, the buildings that enclosed them, as well as the buildings that stored the grain -- began to look very different from the Dart Elevator and the ones that were built in the 19th century. The chief difference was the visual appearance of the grain bins: they were no longer stored within a larger structure (the "mainhouse"), but instead stood alone, on their own.
During and after World War II, the construction and technology of grain elevators changed once again. At some grain elevators, the storage bins were no longer compartments, as they had been since the time of the Dart Elevator, but single rooms capable of storing a million bushels each. At other grain elevators, the machines were no longer housed in buildings of their own, but were -- like the grain tanks they serviced -- freestanding structures, fully visible to the eyes of passers-by. At still other elevators, external conveyor-belts were no longer necessary, because some sailing vessels had machines aboard that did the unloading themselves. Indeed, some "grain elevators" were no longer grain elevators, but grain blowers (or grain suckers, if you prefer): machines that transship piles of grain in bulk by vacuum cleaners and pneumatic tubes, not buckets and belts.
Generally speaking, the old American classics of the 1843 to 1943 era have been destroyed, either to make room for newer facilities or to simply remove a troublesome eyesore or "attractive nuisance," as the lawyers say. In some places, especially in small rural communities with a strong sense of municipal pride, the old classics (the "country elevators") have been turned into museums. In other places, the old classics of the reinforced-concrete variety have been transformed into climbing gyms, planetaria, hotels, and condominiums. Paradoxically, it is only in poor communities -- places like Chicago, Cincinnati and Buffalo -- that classic elevators still stand, but only because they haven't been demolished yet, not because they have been "saved" from demolition.
Quite obviously, we can learn from a great deal from the past. In the course of my research, I have compiled this list of "lessons" that might be useful for the future.
1). In America, the order of development has not the same as it was in Europe, where the rural village existed long before before the big city. In America, the small town and the big city were built at the same time. A "big city" could spout up anywhere, even in the middle of the wilderness. Likewise, big cities collapse and end up looking like wildernesses again.
2). Unlike the production of grain, the grain trade doesn't necessary originate with or even follow the contours of the land. Generally speaking, the grain trade follows the opportunities offered by current business conditions. And so, the grain trade can embrace or abandon a place -- even the very same place -- with equal rapidity and coldness once an opportunity arises.
3). Though the "givens" of the natural environment play a large role in determining the success or failure of a local enterprise, one shouldn't forget that the natural environment can be modified, sometimes quite substantially. And so the question isn't, "Who has access to the best resources?" but "Who can imagine how those resources could be put to use?"
4). There is no such thing as a "pure" invention. All inventions are built upon the work of others. There is certainly something "original" in an invention, but it lies in its imaginative use of something else, something that pre-exists it. This suggests that there are no solitary inventors, no "isolated geniuses," and that inventions are always the work of a team of individuals (at least two of them).
5). The beginnings of modern industry, globalization and other apparently contemporary phenomena are much earlier than we might believe. They all seem to start in the 1840s, not later (the 1880s, the 1920s, or the 1940s). This might help us today, when it global capitalism is undergoing its worst crisis since the 1930s.
6). Despite the widespread notion that most industries strive to produce just enough "quality" or "excellence" to survive, but never strive to produce real excellence for its own sake, many of the grain elevators of the classic period were truly excellent architecture. They were very well-built, and they were very striking to look at, even if the viewer couldn't decide if they were spectacularly beautiful or spectacularly ugly.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Presentation in Wichita, Kansas, 22 February 2010
From 2-3 pm on Tuesday, 23 February 2010, I will be giving a presentation at the Grain Elevator and Processing Society's 81st Technical Conference and Trade School, which will be held at the Century II Performing Arts
and Convention Center
in Wichita, Kansas. Entitled "The Mechanized Grain Elevator: How Did We Get Here?" my presentation will be part of a session coordinated by Kathy Reading, Vice President of Sales at the Seedburo Equipment Co., Des Plaines IL.
For more information, visit GEAPS Exchange 2010.
The mechanized grain elevators of today have their roots in American history. This session, by the author of a new book, will discuss how we got here, and why an understanding of the past may be useful to us in the future. What necessities led to the invention of the mechanized elevator? How did it work? How did grain elevators become so important to the development of the U.S.? How did they influence grain handling in other countries? And what happened to the old American classics?
For more information, visit GEAPS Exchange 2010.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Grain elevator/ethanol plant in Peoria, Illinois
In a prior posting, I mentioned the existence of a large grain elevator/ethanol refinery in Peoria, Illinois. It has been owned and operated by Archer-Daniels Midland since 1980. Had I had the time to do so, I would have directed people's attention to it during the Inland Visual Studies Symposium, at which I gave a brief talk on 16 April 2009. The photograph above was taken by someone who calls himself "Astro Punk" and posts his/her photos to Flickr, which is where I found this one.
Let's begin in the middle, with the barge, which we might imagine to be full of corn in bulk. Upon the shore, perpendicular and right next to the barge, there appears to be a marine tower, that is to say, a tower that contains an elevating leg. Such a leg -- unenclosed in a tower or container of any kind -- certainly stands right behind it. Perhaps they form part of a single grain-unloading system.
To the left (our right) stand four sets of grain tanks that are made out of steel, climb to different heights, and no doubt store different amounts of grain. Perhaps they were built over the course of several years, circa 1900-1915.
Behind and, indeed, rising up between these groups of steel tanks, there is a very tall, unenclosed elevating leg. Right next to this leg, there is the top of a tall workhouse made out of reinforced concrete and the top of a smokestack, which suggests the location of the complex's boiler/engine room. Note well that, beneath and on the other side of this workhouse, there is a silo-building made out of reinforced concrete (not captured by this photo). Judging by its size, this silo-building can probably store as many as one million bushels of grain. It might have been built around 1925.
There is some kind of horizontal gantry or conveyor-belt that -- moving from right to left, across the photo -- connects either the workhouse or the silo-building to another building. From the looks of it, this building could be another, older grain elevator, probably built out of brick and iron, and now used for auxiliary storage. Note that this "second elevator" has its own smokestack and thus its own boiler/engine room. It might have been built anywhere between 1885 and 1915.
Let's return to the barge at the center of the photo: to its right (our left), there is a building with four vertical pipes or tubes on the side that faces the river. Dust collection units? To the right (our left) of this building, there appears to be an old marine tower. Perhaps it unloaded grain from ships and then sent it back to what I have imagined to be the older of the grain storage warehouses on the premises. In any case, behind this structure there can be seen the tops of the steel tanks that are part of the ethanol refinery, which is better seen from the other side of the complex, that is to say, from the side that borders the railroad tracks. The refinery was probably built between 1965 and 1980.
As for the building(s) that stand(s) on the left side of this photo, I am uncertain. An old flourmill? Something built at the same time as the old grain elevator? Yet another grain elevator?
Playing in Peoria, Illinois, continued
My talk in Peoria on 16 April 2009 is mentioned in Lydia's blog. She reports that,
Artists, curators, and students of art were on campus Thursday for the first Inland Visual Studies Center Symposium. The Center focuses on the history and current state of visual studies in the Midwest. Bill Brown, author of American Colossus: The Grain Elevator, 1843–1943, spoke about the sublime impact of something as huge as a grain elevator rising from our flat midwestern prairies.
This uncredited photo shows me in front of a computerized projection of a photograph by Frank Gohlke.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Playing in Peoria, Illinois
As previously announced, on Thursday 16 April 2009, I gave a brief presentation at a symposium organized by the Inland Visual Studies Center at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. Because my presentation was very brief (allotted 10 minutes of speaking time, I spoke for 10 minutes, during which I managed to read aloud pages 335-337 of American Colossus, which concern the "sublimity" of colossal objects), and because I did not have the opportunity to answer a single question at the end of the 90-minute-long panel, I will keep my commentary here brief as well.
1. I saw a great many grain elevators during the five-hour-long drive from Cincinnati to Peoria, and this was quite a treat, even though I saw them from a car traveling 65 miles an hour and I never exited the highway, not to mention got out of the car to take a closer (and better) look. Most of these elevators were small "country" elevators that stored their grain in a few very large cylindrical steel tanks, many of them either brand-new, recently painted or coated with a substance that preserves or protects their "original" shine. The elevating legs at these structures (also made of steel) were "naked," that is, not enclosed in buildings of their own, but exposed to sight and the elements just as they are. It was only when we approached and then crossed into Illinois from Indiana that the grain elevators were larger and employed grain bins (and workhouses) made out of reinforced concrete.
2. On the way into downtown Peoria - indeed, standing right behind the Prairie Arts Center, which was where the reception and inaugural lecture for the Inland Visual Studies Center's symposium were held - I "delighted" in the sight of a large grain elevator located on the banks of the Illinois River, built out of reinforced concrete and currently operated by Archer-Daniels Midland. "Delighted" has to be in quotes, because it was clear from the machine/buildings that had been added to the original structure, which was evidently a lake-to-rail/rail-to-lake transshipping elevator built sometime around 1930, that the complex was now an ethanol plant. As I mention on page 30 of American Colossus, ethanol is a perfect example of the illogical "rationality" of the profit-driven market: it is "surplus grain" (corn, in fact) that is plentiful for some -- but not for all -- precisely because petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides were used to grow it, and that gets processed into "food for cars" because petrochemical fuel is reputedly too expensive.
3. Not surprisingly, several of the farmlands along the route from Cincinnati to Peoria bore signs that proclaimed that these farmlands or, more precisely, the corn and soybeans grown on them, were to America what oil fields are to Saudi Arabia: sources of pride, profit and power. But there is another illogical "rationality" at the basis of such boosterism: it aims to reduce America's dependence on petrochemical fuels that come from foreign countries, but ignores or rather reinforces America's dependence on petrochemical fuels as such. (Note: gas stations in the Indiana/Illinois area inform their patrons that up to 10% of the "gasoline" available at their pumps is ethanol, but this doesn't mean that the "gasoline" for sale is 10% cheaper, or a source of 10% less air pollution.)
4. It was certainly gratifying that two participants in the symposium -- Bruce Lindsey, an architect/professor at Washington University in St. Louis who gave the inaugural lecture mentioned above, and Bennet Johnson, a professional architect from Chicago who participated in one of the two panels that preceded the one I attended -- gave PowerPoint presentations that included pictures of grain elevators, one of which (the Sante Fe Elevator in Chicago) I recognized right away. But it was regrettable that neither gentleman was free to attend the other panels at the symposium, or at the very least "my" panel, which began just minutes after the conclusion of the box-lunch meal at which we were introduced to each other. Also regrettable was the subsequent absence of two other people who either said intelligent things during their respective presentations and/or lunch: Michael Mercil (Ohio State University) and Greg Samata (a computer programmer/video artist from Dundee, Illinois). Their presence was sorely missed during "my" panel, at which one heard that wheat was growing and waving in the wind when the frontiersmen and "settlers" of the 19th century arrived in the Midwest (Bill Conger, a curator/professor at Illinois State University); that "people" in New York City -- which was consistently denounced during the two morning panels -- are alienated or separated from nature, while people in the Midwest -- which was consistently praised for its difference from the "coastal" regions of the country -- are closer to or "in touch" with nature (Paul Krainak, Bradley University); and that the Midwest -- far from being connected to both the Great Lakes and the eastern seaboard through a vast system of rivers and canals -- is actually "landlocked" (Bob Esmer, a sculptor from Chicago).
5. To the aforementioned gentlemen: the Midwest (aka "the Prairies") is not a natural environment, far from it; its entire indigenous ecosystem -- which included Native American peoples, prairie grasses and herds of buffalo -- was in fact destroyed and then replaced with a new one, which was half-imported from the Europe of the 18th and 19th centuries and half-created by the dictates of the global market of the 19th and 20th centuries. In a word, it is as "natural" as New York City's Central Park.
1. I saw a great many grain elevators during the five-hour-long drive from Cincinnati to Peoria, and this was quite a treat, even though I saw them from a car traveling 65 miles an hour and I never exited the highway, not to mention got out of the car to take a closer (and better) look. Most of these elevators were small "country" elevators that stored their grain in a few very large cylindrical steel tanks, many of them either brand-new, recently painted or coated with a substance that preserves or protects their "original" shine. The elevating legs at these structures (also made of steel) were "naked," that is, not enclosed in buildings of their own, but exposed to sight and the elements just as they are. It was only when we approached and then crossed into Illinois from Indiana that the grain elevators were larger and employed grain bins (and workhouses) made out of reinforced concrete.
2. On the way into downtown Peoria - indeed, standing right behind the Prairie Arts Center, which was where the reception and inaugural lecture for the Inland Visual Studies Center's symposium were held - I "delighted" in the sight of a large grain elevator located on the banks of the Illinois River, built out of reinforced concrete and currently operated by Archer-Daniels Midland. "Delighted" has to be in quotes, because it was clear from the machine/buildings that had been added to the original structure, which was evidently a lake-to-rail/rail-to-lake transshipping elevator built sometime around 1930, that the complex was now an ethanol plant. As I mention on page 30 of American Colossus, ethanol is a perfect example of the illogical "rationality" of the profit-driven market: it is "surplus grain" (corn, in fact) that is plentiful for some -- but not for all -- precisely because petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides were used to grow it, and that gets processed into "food for cars" because petrochemical fuel is reputedly too expensive.
3. Not surprisingly, several of the farmlands along the route from Cincinnati to Peoria bore signs that proclaimed that these farmlands or, more precisely, the corn and soybeans grown on them, were to America what oil fields are to Saudi Arabia: sources of pride, profit and power. But there is another illogical "rationality" at the basis of such boosterism: it aims to reduce America's dependence on petrochemical fuels that come from foreign countries, but ignores or rather reinforces America's dependence on petrochemical fuels as such. (Note: gas stations in the Indiana/Illinois area inform their patrons that up to 10% of the "gasoline" available at their pumps is ethanol, but this doesn't mean that the "gasoline" for sale is 10% cheaper, or a source of 10% less air pollution.)
4. It was certainly gratifying that two participants in the symposium -- Bruce Lindsey, an architect/professor at Washington University in St. Louis who gave the inaugural lecture mentioned above, and Bennet Johnson, a professional architect from Chicago who participated in one of the two panels that preceded the one I attended -- gave PowerPoint presentations that included pictures of grain elevators, one of which (the Sante Fe Elevator in Chicago) I recognized right away. But it was regrettable that neither gentleman was free to attend the other panels at the symposium, or at the very least "my" panel, which began just minutes after the conclusion of the box-lunch meal at which we were introduced to each other. Also regrettable was the subsequent absence of two other people who either said intelligent things during their respective presentations and/or lunch: Michael Mercil (Ohio State University) and Greg Samata (a computer programmer/video artist from Dundee, Illinois). Their presence was sorely missed during "my" panel, at which one heard that wheat was growing and waving in the wind when the frontiersmen and "settlers" of the 19th century arrived in the Midwest (Bill Conger, a curator/professor at Illinois State University); that "people" in New York City -- which was consistently denounced during the two morning panels -- are alienated or separated from nature, while people in the Midwest -- which was consistently praised for its difference from the "coastal" regions of the country -- are closer to or "in touch" with nature (Paul Krainak, Bradley University); and that the Midwest -- far from being connected to both the Great Lakes and the eastern seaboard through a vast system of rivers and canals -- is actually "landlocked" (Bob Esmer, a sculptor from Chicago).
5. To the aforementioned gentlemen: the Midwest (aka "the Prairies") is not a natural environment, far from it; its entire indigenous ecosystem -- which included Native American peoples, prairie grasses and herds of buffalo -- was in fact destroyed and then replaced with a new one, which was half-imported from the Europe of the 18th and 19th centuries and half-created by the dictates of the global market of the 19th and 20th centuries. In a word, it is as "natural" as New York City's Central Park.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Bradley University, Illinois
At 2 pm on Thursday 16 April 2009, I will be speaking at the Inland Visual Studies Center symposium at Bradley University, in Peoria, Illinois. The theme will be "Flatlands: Middle America and The Pastoral Sublime." The event will be free, open to the general public and will require no advance registration.
The purpose of the Symposium as a whole is to discuss new theories of Midwest visual culture including relationships between fine art traditions, popular culture, and new design models which respond to the influences of progressive modernist architecture movements defined in Illinois over the last century.
All events will take place in The Horowitz Auditorium, at the Caterpillar Global Communications Center on the Bradley University campus.
1501 W. Bradley Avenue • Peoria, Illinois 61625
Thursday, April 16
9:00 - 10:30 am Panel Discussion, “Manifest Liminality: Midwest As Gateway”
11 am - 12:30 pm Panel Discussion, “Mapping”
2:00 - 3:30 pm Panel Discussion, “Flatlands: Middle America and The Pastoral Sublime”
5:00 - 6:00 pm Reception in the Heuser Art Center lobby
6:30 - 7:30 pm Lecture by Michael Mercil, Horowitz Auditorium, CGCC
Friday, April 17
10:30 – Noon Panel Discussion, “Inland Identities and the "real"
America”, Horowitz Auditorium, CGCC
For more information, see this news item at BU's website.
The purpose of the Symposium as a whole is to discuss new theories of Midwest visual culture including relationships between fine art traditions, popular culture, and new design models which respond to the influences of progressive modernist architecture movements defined in Illinois over the last century.
All events will take place in The Horowitz Auditorium, at the Caterpillar Global Communications Center on the Bradley University campus.
1501 W. Bradley Avenue • Peoria, Illinois 61625
Thursday, April 16
9:00 - 10:30 am Panel Discussion, “Manifest Liminality: Midwest As Gateway”
11 am - 12:30 pm Panel Discussion, “Mapping”
2:00 - 3:30 pm Panel Discussion, “Flatlands: Middle America and The Pastoral Sublime”
5:00 - 6:00 pm Reception in the Heuser Art Center lobby
6:30 - 7:30 pm Lecture by Michael Mercil, Horowitz Auditorium, CGCC
Friday, April 17
10:30 – Noon Panel Discussion, “Inland Identities and the "real"
America”, Horowitz Auditorium, CGCC
For more information, see this news item at BU's website.
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