The Grain Elevators and the World's Bread
Near Duluth, Minnesota
Before the iron ore came, the grain came. In the decades after the Civil War, Duluth became one of the great grain ports of the world, a distinction so outsized it was hard for the city's boosters to say it without sounding like they were exaggerating. Hard red spring wheat grown on the Dakota and Minnesota prairies moved east by rail to the enormous elevators lining the Duluth waterfront, where it was stored, graded, and loaded into the holds of lake freighters for the voyage to Buffalo and on to the flour mills of the East.
The grain elevators of Duluth were engineering marvels of their era. They rose ten and twelve stories above the waterline, their concrete walls holding hundreds of thousands of bushels in individual bins. In a good year, tens of millions of bushels of wheat moved through the Duluth-Superior harbor.
The people who built these elevators were not romantic about their enterprise. They were solving a logistics problem: how do you move a continent's worth of grain to the markets that need it, through a climate that freezes the harbor for much of the winter? The answer was elevators, standardized grading, futures contracts traded on the Chicago Board of Trade, and ships that could hold more wheat than a medieval city could eat in a year.
A few of the great elevators still stand along the Duluth waterfront, though most have been decommissioned or demolished. The ones that remain are enormous presences, windowless concrete towers that once held the bread of the American Midwest before it moved east to the tables of a growing country. They are not beautiful in any conventional sense.
But they are serious, and seriousness is its own form of architecture.
