Peoria’s early commercial enterprises grew from a broad agricultural base, with distilling, cattle marketing, leather processing, and farm machinery manufacturing rising to prominence. Before low-cost transportation became available, grain in Peoria was used largely for domestic consumption, but the opening of the canal connecting Lake Michigan to the Illinois River in 1847 and, seven years later, a rail spur to the Rock Island Railroad at Bureau Junction allowed large quantities of grain to be shipped east and north. In 1870, five years after the Civil War, eight flour mills processed 13,000 bushels of wheat daily, and with the opening of the new Fort Clark Elevator, storage capacity exceeded 175,000 bushels. By 1880, five elevators with a combined capacity of more than 1,100,000 bushels could process 450 carloads of grain per day, and more than 20,000,000 bushels of grain passed through the Peoria market each year on eleven railroads. The distilling business, developed to use surplus grain, soon became Peoria’s largest industry, and between 1900 and 1919 Peoria was the largest distilling center in the world. In the twenty years after the Civil War, Peoria’s population grew from 18,000 to 35,000, and as few undeveloped sites remained along the bluff, comfortable houses rose on newly surveyed streets extending across the prairie to the north and west. About 1884, Charles Feltman, a prominent grain trader, former president of the Peoria Board of Trade, and the man primarily responsible for organizing the Peoria County Farm Bureau, built a large frame residence that, though simpler than some Victorian houses of the time, reflected both basic elements and details of the Victorian pattern, including heavy wood window casings, an eclectic facade with multiple peaks and gables, and a large porch supported by wood columns with Corinthian-style capitals carved from wood. The house was occupied by two generations of the Feltman family for some 90 years until it and its furnishings were purchased by the W. Paul Buchanan family in the 1970's, and despite considerable neighborhood transition it remains in nearly original condition as an excellent example of a large Victorian residence of a prominent business family of its day.