Fireproof Grain Elevators / Concrete Grain Elevators

Frequent losses of grain elevators to fire and explosion drove the search for safer materials and construction methods, leading to experiments with steel, ceramic tile, and concrete. The Great Northern Elevator and Electric Elevator, both built in 1897, were the first to use steel grain bins on a large scale and the first powered by electricity, which had become available from the Adams Power Plant at Niagara Falls in November 1896. Other steel elevators followed on the Buffalo waterfront during the first decade of the 1900s, including the Dakota, Great Eastern, Iron, and Monarch elevators, but steel proved less satisfactory than hoped because heat from grain fires could damage bins and supporting structures; of these, only the Great Northern still stood in 2011. Ceramic tile was also tested in the early 1900s and offered complete fireproofing, heat resistance, and better insulation than steel, but high construction and maintenance costs and the need to monitor many mortar joints for leaks limited its use in Buffalo to two structures: the Washburn Crosby "A" Elevator, erected in 1903 and still standing, and the Maritime Milling Elevator, now demolished. Concrete had already been used in the 1890s for foundations and floors of wooden elevators, but the true era of the concrete grain elevator began with reinforced concrete storage bins, first demonstrated in the United States by a single 124-foot cylindrical bin built in Minneapolis in 1899 using the slip form method. That technique, in which forms were steadily raised as concrete was poured, was used extensively in Buffalo, where engineers built interlocking rows of tall silos that created the city's distinctive corrugated concrete elevator exteriors. Beginning with the American Elevator in 1906, the Buffalo River became a corridor of monumental concrete elevators; from then until the Connecting Terminal Annex was built in 1954, about forty-two concrete grain elevator projects were undertaken along the Buffalo River and Buffalo Outer Harbor. Steel briefly returned for storage bin construction in 1990, when Cargill built four steel storage bins at its Urban Mill in Buffalo, the last grain bins built in the city.

Buffalo, New York · United States