Tile-binned grain elevators, 1901-1910

On pages 219-220 of American Colossus, I mention the fact that grain-elevator designers, in an attempt to make their buildings "fireproof," experimented with using hollow tile (as well as steel and reinforced concrete) as the material out of which the grain bins were constructed. Above: the Red Tile Elevator in Minneapolis; photo by the Historic America Engineering Record.

Here is a list of pioneering tile-binned elevators built between 1901 and 1910:

-- the Great Eastern, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1901

-- name unknown, designed by Barnett-Record for the Canadian Pacific Railway, Port Arthur, Canada, 1902

-- the Saint Anthony #3, designed by Barnett-Record for the Washburn-Crosby Company, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1901-1903

-- the Frontier, aka the Washburn-Crosby, designed by Barnett-Record for the Washburn-Crosby Company, Buffalo, New York, 1903

-- name unknown, designed by G. Luther (Braunschweig, Germany), Bunge y Born Company, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1904

-- the Peavey, designed by Barnett-Record for Frank Peavey, Duluth, Minnesota, 1907

-- the Pillsbury "A" (also known as the Red Tile Elevator), designed by Barnett-Record for the Pillsbury Company, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1909-1910

Where not to buy a copy

Edwin Mellen Press claims that, come 31 July 2009, it will publish a book by William J. Brown entitled History of the Grain Elevators of Buffalo, New York. This claim that has led ecampus.com and a distributor in Taiwan to believe that it will carry the title -- though it is "not yet printed" -- "as soon as it arrives."

Please be informed that this title will never be published by Edwin Mellen Press, nor will it be distributed by ecampus.com or books.com.tw. Anyone who has placed an advance order for this book through any of these companies should demand a refund of their one-hundred-plus dollars (!) immediately.

The Grand Trunk

On page 216 of American Colossus, I mention that a pioneering, steel-binned grain elevator was built in Portland, Maine, by the Grand Trunk Railroad in 1902. Above, we see two views of Elevator #2, which was a very large building (175 feet high, 300 feet long, and 200 feet wide) intended to supplement Elevator #1, which was slightly smaller and built out of wood in 1896. Elevator #1 was demolished in 1943, while Elevator #2 was taken down in 1974.

The Electric Steel

On page 217 of American Colossus, I mention the Electric Steel, a pioneering steel-binned grain elevator built in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was designed by Lewis S. Gillette and built in two stages by the American Bridge Company (1901) and the Minneapolis Steel & Machine Construction Company (1903). As the photographs above show, the Electric Steel utilized a workhouse that stood apart from the 12 grain tanks, which were lined up in a two rows leading straight back from it, so that if a fire or explosion took place, it would not travel easily through the entire complex.



In later years, the Electric Steel Elevator would become part of the Russell Miller Flour Mill, to which it was connected by horizontal gantries that traveled high above ground (see picture above). Today, the elevator still stands and is in use.

The Pioneer Steel

On pages 216-217 of American Colossus, I mention the Pioneer Steel, a pioneering steel-binned grain elevator built in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Designed by the Gillette-Herzog Company and constructed by the Barnett-Record Company in 1901, the Pioneer Steel was owned by the local grain merchant George Frank Piper. In the photograph above, which was taken in 1995 by Jet Lowe of the Historic American Engineering Record, see can see that the elevator possessed a total of 22 freestanding, unenclosed tanks, arrayed in two rows. A conveyor-belt installed in a narrow horizontal gantry was laid on top of the main row of bins. The Pioneer Steel was demolished in 1995.

The Dakota

On page 215 of American Colossus and in the caption for Figure 2, I mention the Dakota, a steel-binned grain elevator built in Buffalo in 1901. As we can see from the pictures above, the Dakota was erected next to the Great Eastern Elevator (to the left), another steel-binned elevator built in 1901, and the Frontier Elevator (on the right), an elevator with bins made of reinforced concrete, built in the 1920s. Directly in front of the Dakota stands the land upon which the historic Watson Elevator used to stand.

Designed by Ballou & Shirley and built by the Eagle Iron Works, the Dakota was clearly an experiment, half-bold and half-tentative. It could only store 1.25 million bushels, utilized rectangular grain tanks, and enclosed these bins in a tall and narrow rectangular warehouse made of steel. The gallery above the tanks was itself two stories high and surmounted by a large clerestory, which gave the entire structure a distinctive "hammer-head" silhouette. Both of the Dakota's marine towers were automotive ("loose"). The entire complex was razed in the mid-1960s, during the construction of an elevated highway.

In the same way that the Great Eastern was built upon a foundation made of reinforced concrete and intended to replace a wood-binned elevator that had been destroyed by a grain-dust explosion, the Dakota was built (by the Lehigh Railroad) to replace a wood-binned elevator of the same name (see below) that was built in 1887, could store 1 millions bushels and was brought down by a grain-dust explosion in 1901.

The Great Eastern

On page 213 of American Colossus, I mention the pioneering steel-binned Great Eastern Elevator, built in Buffalo in 1901. Designed by Harry R. Wait and built by the Steel Storage and Elevator Construction Company, with assistance by the Indiana Bridge Company, which was based in Muncie, Indiana, the Great Eastern could store 2.5 million bushels in its sixty-eight different steel tanks, which were freestanding, unenclosed and built in a variety of sizes upon a rhomboidal plot that was situated on the side south of the Buffalo River. The elevator was demolished in 1948.

In the picture above, which was taken in the 1920s or 1930s, we can see (moving from right to left) the some of the Great Eastern's many steel tanks; the Great Eastern's marine towers (both of which were "loose" and connected to the grain tanks behind them through a series of horizontal belts installed high above ground-level); the wood-binned and soon-to-be-demolished version of the Marine Elevator; and the reinforced-concrete grain tanks of the Kellogg Elevator, built in 1912.



The Great Eastern was built upon a raised foundation made of reinforced concrete, which was strong enough to support the combined weight of the steel-tanks themselves and the grain stored within them (see picture above). It was originally built to replace the Eastern Elevator (see picture below), which was built in 1895 with two marine towers (one of which was "loose") and the site of a terrible grain-dust explosion in 1899.



Note that, at roughly the same time that the Great Eastern was built in Buffalo, a Great Eastern Elevator was built in Minneapolis, Minnesota (see picture below). No doubt the large amount of space left between the workhouse in the center and the grain tanks -- made out of tile -- was intended to minimize the possibilities of fires or explosions traveling between them. It appears that the horizontal conveyor-belt that serviced these tanks was installed through the tops of these tanks, not cleanly above or on top of them.

The Electric Elevator

On pages 209-213 of American Colossus, I discuss the Electric Elevator, a pioneering steel-binned grain elevator built in Buffalo, New York, in 1897 (the same year that the steel-binned Great Northern Elevator in Buffalo was built). Designed for the grain trader Edward W. Eames by W.S. Winn and built by his Steel Storage and Elevator Construction Company (based in Cornersfield, Indiana), the Electric was a truly revolutionary creation. Not only were its bins were made of steel, but they were also free-standing and unenclosed (unlike at the Great Northern, where the bins were enclosed in a brick house).

In the picture above, we see the Electric as it was between 1897 and 1912, when it was only equipped with seven grain-tanks made of steel and set down upon a foundation of reinforced concrete. Note well the rather self-conscious pun on visual resemblances between the elevator's two marine towers, one of which (the one on our right) is "stiff" or fixed in position, while the other (the one on our left) is "loose" and capable of movement along a short set of rail-tracks.

In the picture below, we see the Electric as it was after 1912, when another 12 tanks made of steel were constructed.



Except for the Electric's Annex, which was built out of reinforced concrete in 1942, the entire facility was demolished in 1984.

Grain elevators as colossal monsters

Grain elevators, unlike colossal figures, are not complete. Though they have metaphorical legs, boots, and heads, grain elevators also lack key parts, such as feet, hands, torsos, and hips. They are true mixtures or hybrids, occupying the point half-way between machine/buildings and human effigies. As a result, grain elevators both inspire awe in us and frighten us. They aren't, properly speaking, colossal figures; they are colossal monsters.

Perhaps the best example of this fantasy is an untitled engraving that the American illustrator Joseph Pennell made of a grain elevator in Hamburg, Germany, in 1914 (reproduced above; discussed on page 257 of American Colossus). Note well that Pennell's style, generally speaking, was more documentary that expressionistic. But here, the grain elevator -- perhaps a floater-- is a towering bottle-shaped block of darkness, equipped with four or five long arm-like appendages (canal spouts?) and several other, thinner stalks that extend above its head. The entire thing is surrounded by smoke, clouds and darkness. At its feet, there is a tiny craft, battered by dark waves. The overall effect is clearly intended to be frightening.

Grain elevators as colossal figures

I find I am not alone in referring to the American grain elevator as an American Colossus. According to Drake Hokanson, who mounted an exhibit of his grain-elevator photographs in Perry, Iowa, in February 2007, grain elevators are "American colossi -- giant human figures on the landscape like the huge Egyptian statues in the Nile Valley."

Note: the image above does not depict an Egyptian colossus, such as the Colossus of Memnon, but the Colossus of Rhodes. But it is the general idea that matters here, not the particulars. I might just as well have posted the painting called The Colossus (1808-1812), commonly but incorrectly attributed to Francisco de Goya (see below).



As I point out on pages 258-262 of American Colossus, the word "colossus" doesn't necessarily refer to something that is very big, but to something (an effigy) that stands upright. Colossi and other effigies, though sometimes crudely rendered, are always complete figures: they never lack limbs, torsos or heads. This is why representations of them --no matter how big they are -- are always comforting, not disturbing. They reflect back to us images of our own complete forms.

It is quite true that grain elevators stand upright, not only with respect to the flatness of the areas that surround them, but also upon "legs" (elevating mechanisms) and "boots" (the pits into which the "legs" reach). The anthropomorphism of grain-elevator jargon goes even further: one speaks of "loose" legs and "stiff" legs, "head houses" and even the shoulders of grain elevators. . . .

Brobdingnagian-sized words

On page 237, in the context of my discussion of Charles Magnus' "Bird's Eye View of the City of Buffalo, N.Y", I note that the illustrator has taken great pains to show that each elevator has the last name of its owner and the word "elevator" printed upon it "in Brobdingagian-sized words." My reference was not only to Jonathan Swift's satire Gulliver's Travels (1726), in which Gulliver visits the island of Brobdingag, which is populated by gigantic people who are 72 feet tall, but also to Frank Norris's novel The Pit (1903), in which the narrator proclaims that, "on all sides, blocking the horizon, red in color and designated by Brobdingagian letters, towered the hump-shouldered grain elevators [of Chicago]."

Norris' novel has come up once before, and it will (or, rather, should have) come up again, on page 258 of American Colossus, in which I mention several writers who anthropomorphicized grain elevators: Rudyard Kipling, who spoke of the "high-shouldered" elevators in Buffalo; Carl Sandburg, who referred to the "hunched shoulders" of grain elevators in the Midwest; and the anonymous author of "Ugly but Profitable: The Grain Elevators of Buffalo: Examples of Hideousness in Architecture" (1891), who claimed that Buffalo's elevators "rear their ungainly heads" above the skyline.

Bird's Eye View of the City of Buffalo, N.Y.

I mention Charles Magnus' illustration, "Bird's Eye View of the City of Buffalo, N.Y.," several times in American Colossus. The most important references occur on pages 235-236, in the context of a discussion of the (in)visibility of Buffalo's grain elevators to the city's residents, partisans, and boosters. Prior to 1860, in similar illustrations by J.W. Hill (1853) and J.H. Cohen (1859), grain elevators -- despite their number, great size, and unusual appearance -- were strangely absent from representations of the city in which they were invented, back in 1843.

Things began to change in the early 1860s, during the Civil War, when Buffalo's elevators became "newsworthy" as the result of being targeted by arsonists (commandos from the Confederacy, torches hired by the Western Elevating Association, or anti-American rebels from Canada). By 1863, when Magnus' "Bird's Eye View of the City of Buffalo, N.Y." was published, the elevators were "suddenly" as visible as they should have been, that is to say, as they were all along.

If we "zoom" into certain sections of this remarkable image/map, which was originally photographed and placed on-line by Chuck LaChiusa, we can see many significant grain elevators.

In the detail provided below, we can see the Erie Basin (built in 1854) and the Exchange (1863) elevators.



Below, the Cutter & Austin (date unknown), the C.W. Evans (original 1847, rebuilt 1863) and the Reed (original 1847, rebuilt 1862). Note: a part of the Bennett (built 1863) appears at the middle left.



Below, the Watson (1863) and an unnamed transfer tower, possibly the Excelsior (1862).



Below, the Watson, the Excelsior(?), the Corn Dock (date unknown), and the Main St. (1848).



Below, the Sturges (1863) and the Marine (1848).



Below, in the foreground (south side of the Buffalo River): the Marine and two unnamed elevators, probably the Richmond (1863) and the Hazard (date unknown). In the middle (north side of the Buffalo River), moving from left to right: the Seymour & Wells (1855), the Wadsworth (1846), and the Sternberg "A" and "B" elevators (original 1847, rebuilt 1862).



Below, in the foreground (south side of the Buffalo River): the Evans (date unknown). In the middle (north side of the Buffalo River), moving from left to right: the Sternberg "A" and "B," and the City (original 1859, rebuilt 1863).

John S. Metcalf, continued

On page 224 of American Colossus, I mention the grain elevator that John S. Metcalf designed and built for the Sante Fe Railway in Chicago, Illinois. Completed in 1906, the Sante Fe was one of the first elevators in North America with bins that were built out of reinforced concrete.

Above, we see two photographs of the Sante Fe, both taken by Jet Lowe of the Historic Engineering Record at the same time (circa 1985). In the upper photo, we see the side of the elevator that faced the Chicago River. Note the simplicity of the ironworks: a single marine leg, with barely any covering; three canal spouts; the zig-zagging staircase that climbs the outside of the all-reinforced concrete workhouse; a single spout that sends grain down into a small feed or seed mill next door.

In the lower photo, we see the "other" side of the Sante Fe: the "annex" of cylindrical grain tanks, made out of reinforced concrete, that receives grain from the main house through two horizontal conveyor-belts that appear in the upper right-hand corner. (It is likely that, below ground-level, one or two horizontal conveyor-belts were installed in trenches to carry grain from the annex back to the main house.) The two houses were kept separate from each other so that, in case of fire or explosion, the damage would be limited to one, and would not affect both.

Below is a photograph of the complex as it is today.

The Story So Far. . . .

With a single exception, all of the tasks announced last month have been accomplished. With the posting of yesterday's entry, the last remaining task -- providing "new" images and texts that illustrate or otherwise enrich individual ideas in the book -- is at the half-way-done mark. In the next few weeks, I will attempt to complete this "final" project, and then move on to others.

Reinforced-concrete grain bins

On pages 224-225 of American Colossus, I note that the industrial archaeologist Robert M. Frame III has offered the following useful guidelines for historians of the use of reinforced concrete in the construction of the bins in grain elevators in North America:

1) a period of experimentation (1899-1906);

2) a period of development and eventual mastery (1906-1912); and

3) a period in which the building-material received widespread, if not universal acceptance (1912-1928).

Adopting and slightly altering these guidelines, I have discerned:

1) a period of experimentation (1899-1908);

2) a period of development and mastery (1909-1919);

3) a period of widespread acceptance (1920-1928); and

4) a fourth period, one that lasted between 1929 and 1943, and marked the end of the line begun in 1843 with the Dart Elevator, the world's first mechanized grain elevator.

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For a good text about the "third" period -- universal acceptance (1920-1928) -- see The Literary Digest, August 20, 1921, page 21:

An almost complete change in the methods of constructing country grain elevators, with the employment of concrete in place of wood, has recently taken place, we are told by A.T.R. Curtis, writing in "Concrete" (Detroit). Seldom, he says, has one material of construction replaced another is so short a time. Only a few years ago, the concrete country elevator was a rare xception; to-day in many parts of the country scarcely a wooden elevator less than five years old can be found.

For a photograph that captures the first two-and-a-half periods, see the one below, which shows the grain elevator district in Buffalo, New York, as it was in 1925.



Upper left: the Superior (three stages: 1915, 1923, and 1924). Upper right: the Dellwood (1914-1917). Dead center: the Marine "A" (under construction). Left to right in front row: the Perot (1908), the American (1907), the malthouse associated with the American (1922), and the Electric (1897, steel bins).

For a photograph that captures all four periods, see the one below, which shows Buffalo's grain elevator district as it was in the 1950s.



Virtually all of the elevators visible here were made out of reinforced concrete. Lower left: the Standard (built in two stages: 1928 and 1942). Extreme lower right: Portland Cement (not a grain elevator). Lower right: the Annex to the Electric (built 1942) and towards the middle the Electric itself (steel, not reinforced concrete). Between the Electric and the Lake & Rail: the American (built 1906) and the Perot (1907). Middle left: the Lake & Rail (stages between 1927 and 1930). Middle right: the Marine "A" (built 1925). Upper middle: the Concrete-Central (stages between 1915 and 1917).

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At the center of or, let us say, the driving force behind the fourth period (1943 to the present) was Cargill, the large, ever-growing and now dominant grain-trading company based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Between 1929 and 1933, Cargill stopped leasing or buying grain elevators built by other companies, and started designing and building its own, according to its own lights, not "tradition." At first there were three of these elevators, and they were built in a "line" that traced out the long trip from farm to market: from Omaha, Nebraska (by rail) to Chicago, Illinois, and then from Chicago (by lake vessel) to Albany, New York, where the grain was transshipped to barges for transport down the Hudson River to New York City. Though it might have been more direct to ship grain (by rail) directly from Omaha to New York City, it was cheaper to ship and transship it in this roundabout fashion. Note well: the "flow" of grain is not a natural one; it does not necessarily follow the geographical terrain; it strictly follows the route that is the least expensive, and thus the most profitable, for the shipper (in this case, Cargill).

Cut out of this "line" or "flow" was Buffalo, New York, which Cargill -- believing the place to have fallen "outside" the primary flows of grain from farm to market -- had abandoned at the end of 1920s. During World War II, when international demand for American grain was at an all-time high, and there was money to be made in storing exportable surpluses, Cargill returned to Buffalo, where in 1942 it built an annex to the Electric Elevator, a classic steel-binned elevator that Cargill had purchased in the interim.

In each case, the four new elevators that Cargill built weren't especially large, at least in comparison to other elevators built out of reinforced concrete in the 1910s and 1920s, some of which could store as many as 10 million bushels of grain. The elevator that Cargill built in Chicago in 1932 could only store 1.3 million bushels; the elevator built in Buffalo could store 6 million. Only the Omaha and the Albany elevators (built in 1931 and 1933, respectively) were truly colossal.

What made these four elevators (but especially the elevator in Buffalo) different from their predecessors wasn't their large or small size, but the fact that they didn't use or shifted the emphasis away from large groups of "bins" or "compartments." Instead, they contained huge undivided rooms in which large piles of grain in bulk were dumped and then moved around by front-loading gasoline-powered vehicles with rubber wheels, not by electrically powered horizontal conveyor-belts and lofting legs (as in previous elevators).

There was a single such "room" at Cargill's Chicago elevator; four of them at both the Omaha and Albany elevators; and six at the elevator in Buffalo. In each case, these grain rooms could store a staggering one million bushels. Previously, grain bins had never been designed to store more than 80,000 bushels each!



The elevator that Cargill built in Chicago (see photo above) had short and flat, box-like walls that intersected at right angles, and a pitched roof. Some have said that it resembled a tabernacle. It certainly didn't "look like" a modern grain elevator. If anything, it resembled an old-style "flathouse" (a cavernous barn in which sacks of grain and barrels of flour were stored).

Below is a picture of the elevator Cargill built in Albany. Counting the "traditional" looking cylindrical grain tanks that are arrayed in three parallel rows across it, the facility could store a total of 12 million bushels of grain, making it one of the biggest in the world.



But the Annex to the Electric Elevator seemed to be a deliberate throw-back to the elevators of the 1910s and 1920s (see picture at the top of this entry). From the outside, the six-million-bushel annex appeared to be a collection of cylindrically shaped, self-contained silos (grain bins) surrounded, when feasible, by interstitial "fillers" such as quarter-bins and half-bins, which were also curved like cylinders. But it was not.



As we can see from the picture above, which shows the machine room inside the Electric Annex, the cylindrical shape of the walls was not necessary: the walls could easily have been "flat." The walls or, rather, the reinforced concrete forms that composed them, were in the shape of a series of cylinders for purely aesthetic reasons, not for reasons that concerned physics, efficiency or profitability. The complete breaking of the connection between form and function was intended to be a way of saying, "Here at Cargill, we are doing everything differently, and this even includes the way of our retaining walls are built." Cargill had changed all the rules back in the early 1930s, and the Electric Annex -- built in the very place in which the grain elevator was invented, almost exactly a hundred years previously -- was in part built as an ironic, self-congratulatory testament to those changes and the end of an era.

What happened after 1943? Grain elevators changed so fundamentally that one must start a completely new history, i.e., the history of self-unloading grain ships, sealed storage containers, pneumatic grain-transfer systems, grain storage rooms, et al.

John S. Metcalf, continued

The Missouri Pacific Railway Elevator, located in Kansas City, Missouri, was designed and built by John S. Metcalf in 1904. Note there are two sets of bins: on the left, bins made out of tile, and, on the right, bins made out of reinforced concrete. This suggests that the facility was built in two separate stages. (The photograph above was taken in the early 1940s.)

In the center foreground, there appears to be a freestanding pneumatic dust collector. Its tubes are positioned to "suck" the dust out of the basements (the areas under the grain bins) of each of the silo-buildings. The top of the elevator's workhouse (apparently made of reinforced concrete, not steel and iron) can be seen above and directly behind the dust collector.

John S. Metcalf, continued

To paraphrase the Canadian researcher and author Scott Garrett, the Tiffin Grain Elevator, commonly known as Tiffin No.2, was constructed in 1907-08 by John S. Metcalf Company for what was then the Grand Trunk Railway. A smaller grain elevator, the Aberdeen Elevator, was located about a half-mile away, operated by the Aberdeen Elevator Company and served by the Grand Trunk Railway. The Tiffin was initially constructed with a capacity of two million bushels. An annex, added in 1923-24, pushed the capacity to some 4.6 million bushels. Grain arriving by ship was transshipped to railcars for transportation to Halifax. Like Metcalf's elevator at Port McNicoll (aka Victoria Harbour), the Tiffin had three automotive ("loose") marine towers, each about 120 feet high. Once again like the elevator in Port McNicoll, the Tiffin was closed in 1990; demolition began in 1997. Housing and park areas now dot the area where Tiffin and Aberdeen elevators stood.

Above: the Tiffin Elevator, photographed on 24 August 1982 by Viktor Kaczkowski.

Grain bins made of reinforced concrete, 1899-1908

On pages 220-235 of American Colossus, I discuss the grain elevators that had bins and mainhouses made out of reinforced concrete. Underneath this picture of the first grain bin, and the first cylindrically shaped grain bin, to be made out of reinforced concrete in North America (Peavey's Folly, designed by Charles Haglin and built outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1899), I offer a list of reinforced-concrete grain elevators built between that historic year and 1908.

-- the Peavey, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1899;
-- unnamed elevator, Birkenhead, England, 1899;
-- the Peavey, Duluth, Minnesota, 1900 (rebuilt twice between 1900 and 1904);
-- the George T. Evans Milling Company, Indianopolis, Indiana, 1900-1901;
-- unnamed elevator, Dunston-on-Tyne, England, 1901;
-- unnamed elevator built by Haglin, Fort William, Ontario, 1901;
-- unnamed elevator built by Hennibrique, Genoa, Italy, 1901;
-- unnamed elevator built by Haglin, Duluth, Minnesota, 1902;
-- the Concrete Elevator, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1902;
-- the Canadian Railroad, Port Arthur, Ontario, 1903;
-- the Missouri Pacific Railroad, Kansas City, Missouri, 1904;
-- the Canadian Pacific Railway, Port Arthur, Ontario, 1904;
-- unnamed elevator, Victoria Docks, England, 1904;
-- unnamed elevator, Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, 1905;
-- the Sante Fe, Chicago, Illinois, 1906;
-- the Washburn-Crosby, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1906;
-- the American, Buffalo, New York, 1906;
-- unnamed elevators built by Haglin in North Dakota and Minnesota, 1907;
-- the Ralston Purina, Buffalo, New York, 1907;
-- Riverside Malting, Black Rock, New York, 1907;
-- J. H. Tromanhauser, Goderich, Ontario, 1907;
-- the Mt Clare Elevator (Baltimore & Ohio Railroad), Baltimore, Maryland, 1908;
-- the Pennsylvania Railroad, Baltimore, Maryland, 1908.

The Great Northern Elevator(s)

On pages 204-209 of American Colossus, I discuss the two steel-binned grain elevators that the Great Northern Railway built in Buffalo, New York, and West Superior, Wisconsin, between 1897 and 1901. Poor Reyner Banham, author of A Concrete Atlantis (MIT Press, 1986), believes that the Great Northern Railway built three such elevators:

all were designed by Max Toltz, the bridge builder and presiding engineering genius of the Golden Age of the Great Northern Railway, which served Minnesota and the western Great Lakes area. One of them was in Duluth, Minnesota; one in West Superior, Wisconsin; and the third was at the other end of the lake-shipping trade, at Buffalo, New York. All were enormous, with capacities of better than two million bushels, and were housed in brick shells of handsome architectural aspect.

.

But there were only two of these elevators (one in West Superior and one in Buffalo), and Banham himself provides the proof, in the form of a quotation from Engineering News for August 1, 1901:

Perhaps one of the best, and certainly one of the latest examples of elevator construction which deserve mention, is the 3,00,000 bushel terminal elevator put in operation at West Superior, Wis., in February of this year. This elevator was built by the Great Northern Railway and is designed to eclipse in every way the mammoth steel elevator built by the same company at Buffalo, New York, in 1897-98.

Banham's mistake no doubt derived from thinking that Duluth and West Superior are two different places, when in fact they are one (twin port-cities on the St. Louis Bay).

Of course the Great Northern Railway built a great many grain elevators prior to and long after 1896. (In 1958, the railway still serviced more than 900 "country" elevators, that is, small houses that collect grain and then ship it out by rail to much larger elevators further down the "grain stream.") But by building and operating "terminal" grain elevators in key port-cities on the Great Lakes, the Great Northern Railway could dominate two major flows of grain in bulk: not only the one that came from Western Minnesota, the Dakotas and Montana to flour millers in Minneapolis/St. Paul, but also the flow that came to Duluth/West Superior and then traveled by lake vessels to Buffalo, New York, where it was transshipped to either railcars or barges for (semi-final) transportation to New York City.

The Great Northern Elevator in Buffalo was built two or three years before the Great Northern "S" in Duluth/West Superior (pictured above). Furthermore, the elevator in Buffalo has received a great deal of attention since it was closed down in 1981 (precisely because of plans to demolish it), while the Great Northern "S" has received little or no attention (perhaps because it remains in use). And yet, Duluth/West Superior (not Buffalo) is the place to begin this story.



It was in the St. Louis Bay, around 1895 or 1896, that the Great Northern Railway first started building and operating terminal elevators: the Great Northern "A" and the Great Northern "X" (see picture above), both of which were capable of storing 1.5 million bushels of grain in their respective bins, which were made of wood and rectangularly shaped.



The Great Northern Elevator in Buffalo (see picture above) was a revolutionary elevator for a number of reasons:

1) it was equipped with three electrically powered automotive ("loose") marine towers. Previous elevators had both fewer towers and towers powered by coal-burning steam-engines, not electricity off the grid;

2) its grain bins were made of steel, cylindrically shaped and capable of storing 2.5 million bushels of grain. Previous elevators (except for those designed and built by George H. Johnson) utilized rectangular bins made out of wood, not steel. Bins made out of steel -- especially in storage warehouses that were four times larger than those built by Johnson in the 1850s and 1860s -- were too heavy to support without recourse to a system of arches and columns, which took up space that would normally be occupied by grain-handling machines (hoppers, spouts and horizontal conveyor-belts);

3) its steel frame was so strong and well-designed that it supported the entire structure (the headhouse as well as the grain bins, which of course included both interstitial and main bins), which meant that the brick walls that surrounded the building could be "curtain" walls, that is, "decorative" walls that do not bear any loads.

But the Buffalo Great Northern was also a grain elevator with a couple of serious problems (remember: it was an experiment, not the continuation of a well-established tradition).

1) its "loose" marine towers were top heavy, and one or several of them were toppled during a storm in 1922; they had to be replaced with two brand-new towers;

2) despite its fantastic steel chassis, raised high above the ground, the elevator still required a basement in which to place its "boots" (grain pits), from which grain was scooped up by eight internal lofting "legs" that raised it to the top of the structure. In this case, the boots had to be placed below water level, which meant that they became flooded during storms;

3) it stopped being used as a transshipping elevator (transferring grain from lake-to-rail or rail-to-lake) in the 1920s, when a large flourmill was built next to it. Transformed into a receiving elevator for this flour mill, the Great Northern soon became dependent upon it. In 1981, when its then-owner, Pillsbury, decided to close the elevator because it no longer needed such a large amount of storage space, the Great Northern could not be used as anything else. Furthermore, once it was closed down and allowed to deteriorate, it could no longer be re-opened as a grain storage warehouse.

As for the Great Northern "S," which was "designed to eclipse in every way the mammoth steel elevator built by the same company at Buffalo, New York, in 1897-98." Did it in fact eclipse the elevator in Buffalo? In hindsight, the Great Northern "S" wasn't nearly as experimental as its predecessor.

1. Because it was designed to collect grain from railcars and transship it to lake vessels, the Great Northern "S" no marine towers at all. All it needed was a conventional system of spouts that could conduct grain down into the holds of such vessels.

2. Its grain bins (though made of steel) were shaped like grain bins that were made out of wood: rectangularly, not cylindrically. This meant that the "modern" problem of interstitial space wasn't even posed. After the widespread acceptance of reinforced concrete in the 1910s and 1920s, grain bins (no matter what the material used to construct them) have been built in cylindrical shapes.

3. Its walls were built in the conventional fashion: they were load-bearing walls, made of iron and steel, resting upon a solid foundation of masonry.

4. Because there was no basement into which to burrow or, rather, a strong desire not to have any basement become flooded, the elevator's nine lofting legs had to rise that much higher above ground level. This is why they "stick out" above the roof of the mainhouse itself. The result, at least to my eyes, is not "handsome," but strikingly ugly.

What made the Great Northern "S" a better elevator than the Great Northern Elevator in Buffalo is that the former encountered so few problems. Indeed, the Great Northern "S" was so well-designed and well-built that it could remain viable, even after 1909, when two large grain elevators made out of reinforced concrete were constructed right next to it (see below).





It should not go without mention that the Great Northern Railway erected grain elevators in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which was where the company's headquarters were located. Below is a picture of one such elevator, which was built before 1899, could store 1.5 million bushels and was apparently made out of wood and wrapped in corrugated iron.



Note well, at ground-level, the two open doors, through which railcars could be driven; and, right next to those doors, the two vertically arrayed, rectangularly shaped boxes in which the elevator's lofting legs were installed.

John S. Metcalf, continued

In 1903, John S. Metcalf designed and built Elevators "A" and "B" for the Canadian Northern Railroad in Port Arthur, Canada. As this undated photograph shows, sometime after 1903 (the following year, in fact) these two elevators (evidently steel bins surrounded by iron-clad walls) were connected by two sets of cylindrically shaped grain tanks that were constructed out of hollow tile by the Barnett & Record Company.