Plains Folk

NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

November 12, 1998

Plains Folk: In the Shadow of the Concrete Colossus

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Reviewing Russell Stubbles' "Skyscrapers of the Prairies" in my last column set me thinking about the significance of country grain elevators to life on the Great Plains. It seems that a lot of other people are thinking along the same lines.

Bruce Selyem of Bozeman, Mont., for instance. For years he's been traveling the plains and the Midwest photographing elevators. He's been to more than 1,200 sites in 19 states and provinces.

"After about five years of photographing elevators on weekends and vacations," Selyem reports, "I was going back to some favorite locations to find the elevators had been demolished—knowing that along with their physical removal from the landscape, other history is also lost. What happened to all the records, journals, stories?"

By the summer of 1996 he had organized the Country Grain Elevator Historical Society. He and his wife Barbara pretty much run the society, but they have 360 members and a Web site (http://www.gomontana.com/grainelevator). Their mission, they say, "is to promote the preservation of country grain elevators and their history by the collection, conservation and dissemination of information for documentary and educational purposes." People with personal experiences at grain elevators are invited to share them on the Elevator Diaries page of their Web site. One Montanan, for instance, built elevators in the 1940s. "I think it took about nine carloads of lumber and material to build one," he recalls. "If each of the crew drove a 100 lb. keg of 20 penny spikes a day, he put in a pretty good day and had some blisters."

The Country Grain Elevator Historical Society is not working specifically on the physical preservation of elevators, but some other people are. People in Inglis, Manitoba, have formed the Inglis Area Heritage Committee Inc. (http://www.techplus.com/iahc/) and are working to preserve the town's five wooden elevators and make them into an interpretive center. Inglis stood at the end of the Russell subdivision of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. The railroad pulled out and the elevators closed in 1995. They've done development studies and are trying to raise funds locally and from the province.

In the states, the various state historical societies have shown some interest in vintage grain elevators. One in Appleby, S.D., is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. When I was surveying historic buildings in Bowman County, N. D., last year I photographed wooden metal-clad elevators along the Milwaukee Railroad line in Griffin, Scranton and Gascoyne and pointed out the significance of such monumental buildings.

The best piece of writing on Great Plains grain elevators I have seen is an article by David Baird (then chair of the history department at Oklahoma State University) published in the "Chronicles of Oklahoma" in 1992. Dave was sent out by the Oklahoma Historical Society to study the elevators of western Oklahoma, and he did a fine job of it. He says, "Grain elevators are to the people of the plains symbols of both time and place."

Dave describes the wood-cribbed style of construction that prevailed in the years after 1889 when Oklahoma was settled and notes the common practice (not so common on the northern plains) of covering the buildings with galvanized iron or tin sheeting. He also describes the less common types built of steel or tile. And of course, he recognizes the subsequent rise of concrete as the material of choice (the first concrete elevator being "Peavey's Folly" in Minneapolis, 1900).

It's high time to think seriously about the future of wooden country elevators in the Great Plains landscape.

###

Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136