Books in Canada
For over a century, wooden gabled grain elevators have "defined the Canadian prairies", according to Greg McDonnell, author and chief photographer of Wheat Kings: Vanishing Landmarks of the Canadian Prairies, a fine production which, with a dust jacket featuring a grain elevator silhouetted against a resplendent sunset, will enhance coffee tables.
Traditional grain elevators have been dubbed "prairie cathedrals", since, in frontal profile, they resemble steepled churches. They are also faintly anthropomorphic, with pointy head, sloping shoulders, and stout torso. But one by one, they are vanishing, going the way of the small-town railroad station and manned lighthouses, the Arrow and the Bluenose-the way of all cherished icons.
If you want someone to document a fall from grace, then McDonnell is your man. An Ontario firefighter with a passion for railroad writing and photography, McDonnell is known for handsome picture books such as Passing Trains and Signatures in Steel. The latter work, composed during the Canada death watch that followed Free Trade and the Via Rail cutbacks of the early 1990s, was coloured particularly by McDonnell's blue-collar bitterness over the betrayal of the nation-building effort by time and macroeconomics.
The first grain elevator sprang up alongside the tracks of the newborn Canadian Pacific Railway at Gretna, Manitoba, in 1881-four years before Riel's Northwest Rebellion. By 1933, close to 6,000 grain elevators dotted Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. These simple and durable railside appurtenances became focal points in prairie social and economic life.
The ritual of carting grain in to be weighed and scooped up into tall storage bins provided the farmers one of their rare occasions to exchange news and views with others and to gather supplies at nearby stores. A town's name emblazoned on the elevator's flank signalled that community's importance as a link between the planet's hungry mouths and the land we once dubbed "the breadbasket of the world".
But the consolidation of small farms into mega-farms and the abandonment of railway branch lines spell the end for the traditional elevator. Today's farmers increasingly ship their grain by long-haul tractor-trailer to regional "high-throughput grain handling centres" where super-efficient, unlovable steel and concrete plants each do the work of a dozen old-style elevators.
Fewer than 1,200 prairie cathedrals remain standing, and many of those, as this book shows, are peeling, decaying, groaning in the wind. A handful may survive as heritage artifacts. The rest will succumb to demolition crews. "As each one falls, the prairie becomes a lonelier place," says McDonnell. As the elevators go, the small towns follow. "Closed cafes, boarded-up storefronts, and virtual ghost towns are becoming commonplace."
McDonnell will probably find this book a tougher sell than his railway snaps. There are legions of train aficionados, but who ever heard of a grain elevator buff? And while train photos may benefit from dramatic settings with the subject in implied motion, grain elevators inhabit a flat nowhere and look almost identical. Some are red, some white. Some are solitary, others stand in rows. That's about it.
Nevertheless, though a handful of the hundred pictures in this book are dull industrial shots, by and large McDonnell has an imaginative variety of approaches to his subject and has produced what must surely be the best selection of grain elevator photos you'll ever see: elevators across snow, or at dawn at the head of a slumbering Main Street, or serene under the moon, or bathed in mystic light. Occasionally an abandoned auto or rusting harvester underscores the theme of rural decay. Some of the most striking pictures adhere to a formula: dark, ponderous clouds fill the background while elevators and grain fields bask in gilded front-lighting from a low sun.
McDonnell inevitably gets his beloved trains into the picture, usually poised diagonally at the base of an elevator, but sometimes high-balling through open fields with not an elevator in sight. Never one to resist false pathos, McDonnell recounts the death throes of grain boxcar CN 445572 in the grip of a hydraulic shear at a Manitoba scrap yard.
Still, some of his fans will sense that, in Wheat Kings, McDonnell has resigned himself to the reality that, as the saying goes, you can't stop progress. Occasionally he wraps up a block of text with an upbeat fillip. One photo sequence tracks the demolition of an elevator till it keels over and collapses in a cloud of splinters and dust. An old-timer surveys the wreckage in silence: "That's it," he says, and walks away. The meadowlark resumes its song and the seeds of the next harvest slowly push their way through the soil. Ian Allaby(Books in Canada)
Review
Product Description
As the twenty-first century marches forward, the country grain elevator rapidly nears extinction. These classic wooden structures once used to store grain are being torn down by the hundreds along with thousands of miles of railway branchlines. A proud and honored way of life is coming to end.
Wheat Kings is a lavishly illustrated and poignantly written look at the passing of the traditional northern prairie grain elevators and the communities and railcars that served them. The book includes photographs of grain elevators from numerous small prairie towns. Also included are images of the region's train stations, churches, farms and commercial buildings, many abandoned.
The book is organized by six concise essays. These include:
- Wheat Kings: brief history of grain elevators
- Of Peddlers, Pullers and Tramps: the prairie railroad system
- Something Big on the Horizon: concrete high-capacity super elevators
- McMahon - Hard Times on the Prairies: a forgotten town
- The Last Harvest: an elevator comes down
- Buffalo Bones: the end of the railroad grain cars.
Wheat Kings is a chronicle of the end of an era as witnessed by one of North America's best-known and most-respected railroad writers and photographers. This book is sure to fascinate railway enthusiasts, transportation historians, and anyone interested in the changing worlds of farming and railroading.
(200812)About the Author
Greg McDonnell's writing and photography have been praised by rail enthusiasts across North America. Each new book by Greg McDonnell is a major event in the large railfan community, and Boston Mills Press is proud to be his publisher. Greg is a featured columnist for Trains magazine. His acclaimed large-format pictorials include Canadian Pacific, Signatures in Steel, Heartland, U-Boats: General Electric's Diesel Locomotives, and Passing Trains. He is currently at work on a new book and overseeing a Masters of Railway Photography book series for Boston Mills Press. He lives with his wife and three sons on the edge of a ravine overlooking the Canadian Pacific Railway's Orr's Lake Hill.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Wheat Kings
Streaming in the driveshed doorway, the hot midday sun cuts a shaft of white light through the haze of grain dust that fills the Manitoba Pool elevator at Gretna. Resident sparrows hop across the worn wooden planks that form the driveshed floor, picking at spilled grain and twittering in concert with the incessant chatter of the No. 1 loading leg. The aged wooden structure quivers and dust shakes from every seam and joint as the leg, an enclosed vertical conveyor that runs up the spine of the elevator, scoops grain from a pit beneath the floor and carries it upward.
It's the consummate prairie experience: stepping into an aging country elevator and savoring the rich aroma of new wheat and old wood; listening to the chirping birds while trading stories with the manager; watching battered old grain trucks arrive and talking bushels-per-acre, moisture content, dockage, and the politics of farming with the drivers. It's marveling at the maze of garner levers, slides and scales, legs, cups, boots and belts -- and choking back the dust as the manager puts them all into motion to move the latest load of grain from the receiving pit to storage bins. It's wood-slab walls lined with neat rows of tools, shovels and brooms, and yellowed posters that warn of the dangers of fire, spell out the specifics of boxcar and hopper loading, and shout CHILDREN NOT PERMITTED in bold print.
The country elevator is a noisy, dirty, and at times unsafe place, and yet it has an undeniable appeal. An unassuming structure designed as a facility to store and handle grain, the simple country elevator has eclipsed its intended role and become a prairie institution that has been woven into the social and economic fabric of the Canadian heartland. From the great elevator rows at places like Carstairs, Innisfail, Vulcan and Zealandia, to lonely granaries at unpopulated delivery points, the familiar gabled profile of the humble grain elevator has become a fixture on the prairie landscape. For more than a century, the country elevator has not only defined the Canadian prairies, it has afforded all who care to venture inside one, a passageway to the heart and soul of prairie life.
The office door slams and the sparrows flit up into the rafters as a man in dusty coveralls and a sweat-stained ball cap crosses the driveway. He pauses at the large steel wheel that controls the distributor at the top of the No. 1 leg, rotates it to align a dust-caked arrow with the number 12, and disappears down a narrow wooden corridor that leads to the back scale.
The work floor is covered with loose grain and the wood-slab walls are thick with cobwebs and decades of dust. Long wooden garner levers reach down from the ceiling and an old Fairbanks-Morse scale reposes in front of a giant wooden hopper that receives grain from the overhead bins. The big sliding door to the outside is pushed open, but all but a few rays of daylight are obscured by a forty-foot boxcar spotted for loading.
The loading spout, a serpentine chain of bottomless buckets, reaches deep inside the empty car. CP 124047 OATS-BARLEY-FLAX-RYE-WHEAT. The car number and load levels for various grains are stencilled on the wooden boards that line the inside of the car, and the exact profile of the previous load is clearly defined by a thick layer of dust.
In the dim yellow light of bulbs encased in explosion-proof fixtures, Ted Schmidt secures the loading spout to the top rail of the grain door that seals off the lower portion of the boxcar doorway and initiates a time-honored ritual practiced in thousands of prairie elevators for over a century. With the tug of a garner lever, the loading begins.
A deluge of grain pours from an overhead bin and a choking cloud of dust envelops the room as the scale hopper fills with two-and-a-half tons of amber grain. His face half covered by a dirty paper mask intended to make the air at least breathable, Schmidt fusses instinctively with the ancient scale and deftly manipulates the garner and hopper levers. In 4,800- to 5,100-pound portions, he carefully measures out fifty tons of No. 2 red wheat. Sampled, scaled and dropped into the pit, it is lifted by the polished-steel scoops of the leg and carried to the top of the elevator, dumped into the distributor and directed down the car spout. With a loud rush, a surging torrent of wheat, some 2,200 bushels of it, spills into the dark interior of the aging CP boxcar.
Reinforced with ribs of band iron and tension-nailed into position, the heavy cardboard grain door holds back the swelling tide of grain. An improvisation devised in the last century, the grain door handily converts a boxcar into a vehicle capable of transporting loose grain -- something it was never designed to do. Grain doors have evolved from rough-hewn wood slabs nailed across the doorway, to the corrugated-paper-and-band-iron Steel-Corr doors stocked at Gretna. However, it's an invention that's had its day. The grain door market is vanishing and the art of coopering a boxcar, once practiced at every elevator on the continent, is becoming a forgotten craft.
The boxcar has been a staple of the grain trade since the first sheaves of export wheat were harvested off the prairie, but in 1996, CP 124047 is a rolling anachronism. Although the Canadian grain-box fleet totaled over 20,000 cars as late as 1974, their days were numbered. By the 1980s, covered hoppers capable of carrying twice as much grain, and able to load and unload in a fraction of the time, banished the venerable grain box from all but a handful of lines unable to accommodate heavier cars. A decade later, barely a thousand grain boxes remained in service, with most of their number assigned to CN's Churchill line. Standing axle-deep in the weeds at Gretna, the 124047 and its twelve companions are among just 158 forty-foot grain boxes left in CP service.
Their riveted flanks streaked with rust and coated with years of road dirt, the CP forty-footers wear the battle scars of more than four decades of duty like a badge of honor. Scrapes, dents and patches of fresh paint bear testament to the rigors of uncalculated millions of miles racked up wheeling prairie harvests to the Lakehead and to tidewater ports. The human touch is evidenced by grab irons polished to a shine by the grip of a thousand gloved hands, but there are biblical overtones to the tiny green shoots that sprout from germinating grain lodged in door sills and fatigue cracks in the steel sides of the cars. Scrawled in fading chalk on the side of CP 18563, a single word speaks volumes: West.
Tired coil springs creak as they slowly compress under the weight of another load and the entire carbody of CP 124047 groans in protest as the elderly car takes on fifty tons of Thunder Bay grain. Ted Schmidt scribbles the particulars of the shipment on the mandatory Canadian Grain Commission "I-90" tag that must accompany the car and staples it to the weathered placard board affixed to the car door. Car number, shipping station, date, destination, grain, grade, dockage, etc. -- the I-90 documents every detail. Nowhere, though, does the government form provide for notation of the most critical information. For the 124047, and indeed for all 158 surviving CP grain boxes, this is the last harvest.
It's week fifty-two on the Wheat Board calendar, and July 31, just days away, will mark not only the end of the crop year, but the official abandonment of CP's six remaining "boxcar branches," the Dunelm, Shamrock and Neudorf subdivisions in Saskatchewan and the Lyleton, Russell and Gretna subs in Manitoba. With that, the vintage grain boxes will be out of work. Their final orders have already been issued. Upon unloading at Thunder Bay, the cars will be waybilled to Mandak in Selkirk, Manitoba, and cut up for scrap.
Seemingly oblivious to the historic occasion, Ted Schmidt labors on, loading car after car, following a procedure little changed since the Ogilvie Milling Company erected a 25,000-bushel elevator just up the track in 1881. Gretna made history when "Ogilvie's No. 8," the first standard grain elevator in western Canada, opened for business in the same year that the CPR spiked its rails into the small village hard by the 49th parallel. One hundred fifteen years later, on July 22, 1996, Schmidt and the boys at the Pool elevator are making history of their own.
"We're closing in eight days," says manager James Borgford. Even as he speaks, Edwin Penner is preparing to install grain doors in CP 124002, the forty-foot grain box that will be the last car ever loaded in Gretna. The dilapidated elevators on the other side of the tracks haven't loaded cars in years. Ogilvie's No. 8 burned to the ground in the firestorm that ravaged Gretna on April 28, 1913, and the weather-beaten elevator that stands in its place (moved there from West Gretna in 1928) appears derelict. In a town that once boasted at least a half-dozen grain elevators, the Pool is the last active survivor. Within hours, Ted Schmidt will watch the last grains of wheat trickle into CP 124002, and as he slides the heavy steel boxcar door shut, he will also close the books on a rich chapter of prairie history. In Gretna, where it all began, the era of the country elevator has come to an end.
The situation in Gretna is far from unique. Indeed, elevator closures have been a fact of life on the prairies for decades. From a peak of 5,758 in 1933, the number of country elevators in the Prairie Provinces declined to 2,800 by 1984, and less than half that number remained by 1996. Mechanization, increased farm size, railway branchline abandonments, grain company mergers and rationalization of the grain-handling system have contributed to the demise of hundreds of country elevators, but the silo-shaped, multi-million-dollar, concrete super-elevator has sounded the death knell for the entire country elevator network on the prairies.
In ever-increasing numbers, the slip-form concrete behemoths are rising over the prairie, and each one of the new-generation facilities spells ...
