The Grain Elevators

Fortuitous geography, local engineering ingenuity, and American business acumen gave Buffalo a pivotal role in forwarding grain to national and international markets. After the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, transshipment of grain between Great Lakes vessels and other carriers stimulated the city's growth as a major inland port. Before 1842 all transshipment was manual, but that year Buffalo merchant Joseph Dart built the world's first grain transfer elevator, a steam-powered wooden structure whose innovative marine leg established enduring principles of grain handling on the Buffalo waterfront. As grain storage and handling expanded, Buffalo elevators evolved to improve versatility, speed, and safety, and by 1894 the Eastern elevator plant, Buffalo's largest wooden elevator, could receive, ship, store, mix, weigh, and condition grain at considerable rates with many operations carried out simultaneously, though it was destroyed by fire within five years. Frequent losses to fire and explosion prompted a search in the 1890s for safer building materials, construction methods, and drive systems, leading Buffalo's Great Northern and Electric Elevators to pioneer electric drive and use steel storage bins in pursuit of a fireproof elevator, before steel and tile were in turn superseded by reinforced concrete bins. Concrete construction techniques pioneered in Europe in the 1890s were refined in America after the turn of the century, and American slip-forming methods allowed tall cylindrical bins to be erected rapidly and economically in long interlocking rows; within two years of the first slip-formed elevator, Buffalo adopted the method, and the American Elevator of 1906 displayed the industrial architecture that came to characterize the waterfront. The construction of Buffalo's fourteen waterfront concrete elevator complexes culminated in a peak storage capacity of sixty million bushels by 1943. By 1924 Buffalo led the world in the volume of grain handled, and shipments exceeded three hundred million bushels in 1928, with forty-eight percent transferred to rail, twenty-one percent to the Welland Canal, fourteen percent to the Barge Canal, and seventeen percent retained for the growing milling trade. By the 1930s, however, Buffalo's strategic position in the grain trade began to falter as U.S. and Canadian grain bypassed the port's transfer elevators and traffic shifted to Pacific Coast ports, the improved Welland Canal, the Mississippi River, and the St. Lawrence Seaway. During the 1960s and 1970s many of Buffalo's elevators closed, but substantial capacity remained active in support of the city's flour milling trade.

Buffalo, New York · United States