Trangsrud Elevator

Peder Borderud, Simon Hanson, Simon's nephew John Rustad, and Ole Svengaard visited the Red River Valley from Mitchell County, Iowa, to examine homestead possibilities in 1870, then returned to Iowa and came back with more scouts, including Hans Trangsrud, and many established homesteads near the Sheyenne River. Hans Trangsrud's son Amund married Rikka Myrah and purchased a homestead one mile south of the family's original homestead. Their original granary for grain storage was built in the early 1900's, and the family remodeled it in the early 1920s to add an elevator for handling grain and an area for horse-drawn wagons to drive into the loading area, along with a 10,000-pound scale and grain shoot covered by a trap door. The granary and elevator were used year-round to store grain in the fall, load and haul stored grain to town for sale after harvest, clean seed grain in the winter, and grind cattle and pig feed. The elevator was converted to electric power in the late 1930s or early 1940s and remained in use until the 1970s, when its handling capacity could no longer keep up with the volume of grain harvested by larger combines.

North Dakota · United States