The Engineers of the Grain Elevators

During the first half of the twentieth century, more than 30 concrete grain elevators lined Buffalo's inner and outer harbors, culminating over 60 years of grain elevator design that began in 1842 when Buffalo grain merchant Joseph Dart and engineer Robert Dunbar built the first storage and transfer grain elevator of its type on the Buffalo River. Drawing on principles engineer Oliver Evans had devised in 1782 for handling flour and grain in Philadelphia, Dart and Dunbar used a steam engine to power a looped belt of buckets on a marine leg that lifted grain from ship bins into elevator bins, sharply increasing the speed of transfer from lake boats to canal boats and helping launch a boom in Erie Canal grain traffic. Before this innovation, a full team of dock workers could handle at most 2,000 bushels a day, while Dart's elevator could unload 1,000 bushels an hour, later nearly 2,000 an hour; in 1842 it was the only elevator on the Buffalo River, and by 1862 20 elevators lined the river with a total capacity of four million bushels. Dunbar, born in Scotland and trained in mechanical engineering in Canada, became the architect and designer of almost all the original wooden elevators along the Buffalo River and went on to design and erect more than 75 elevators across America and Europe. In the twentieth century, H.R. Wait, after work on the pioneering Electric Elevator A, formed the Monarch Engineering Company in Buffalo in 1909 and designed many of the city's elevators, including Concrete Central, whose raised basement and conveyor system exemplified his innovations. A.E. Baxter designed some of the most prominent grain elevators and mills on Buffalo's waterfront, including the Pillsbury flour mill of 1924, then the largest in the world, and his career spanned water-powered wooden mills, steel grain elevators, and reinforced-concrete elevators powered by electricity.

Buffalo, New York · United States