Elevator

in agricultural countries, a building used for handling grain. An elevator differs from a warehouse or a granary in that it has special facilities for obviating labor. First of all are the elevators to which farmers draw their grain. In the Red River Valley, for instance, grain is hauled in bulk in wagon boxes with high sides. The wagon is driven under shelter upon a balanced platform. The platform tilts on a pivot, lowering the rear end of the wagon; the tail board of the wagon box is opened, and the wheat or other grain slides out and down into a pit. Tin cups or buckets running on an endless belt, driven usually by a gasoline engine, scoup up the grain and carry it aloft into any one of many bins. These receiving elevators stand usually on a spur track for the accomodation of freight cars. Grain is loaded into the cars, running by its own weight through spouts.

State laws authorize the erection of elevators along suitable sidetracks, and require railways to provide proper car service. Large grain buyers erect a series of elevators, one at a station, for the entire length of a railway system. Competing buyers put up competing lines of elevators. Not infrequently grain raisers combine to build a farmers' elevator to handle and sell their own grain and save the middleman's profit. A town of 1,000 people may have a dozen elevators. Altogether they loom conspicuously against the horizon. They are the skyscrapers of the prairie town.

Mammoth elevators are built at terminal points. An elevator with a storage capacity of 1,000,000 bushels excites no remark. Ordinarily a terminal elevator handles but one article, as wheat, oats, barley, corn, timothy seed, clover, flax, etc. There are facilities for fanning and for sifting and for drying and for mixing. Certain elevators, as those at Kasota, Minnesota, make a specialty of sending wheat in showers through a blast of sulphur vapor, this, not only to destroy smut, but to bleach the kernels and impart a bright, marketable color. Ninety cars a day may be treated.

The American elevator originated at Buffalo, New York,--a meeting place of lake, railway, and canal transportation. The work of transferring grain in bags was not only laborious, but it was slow and expensive. The building of elevators is a business in itself. They must be able to withstand enormous bursting pressure. When lumber was less expensive the outer walls of the large elevators were built of heavy plank laid flat and spiked down, one on the other, to a height of perhaps a hundred feet. The whole was covered oftentimes with iron sheeting to keep out rain and ward off sparks from passing locomotives. The walls were tied together by partitions and long iron rods. The increasing cost of wooden construction and immense losses from fire have led to the use of concrete, reinforced by steel bars. With a change of material has come a change of shape also. The rectangular form has given way to the circular.

The following table showing the number of elevators and their storage capacity in bushels for the more important grain centers is taken from the Minneapolis Journal (1909):