Dart's Elevator and the Grain Coast

Stand anywhere near Buffalo's waterfront and look inland. What you see are the grain elevators, those massive concrete cylinders rising above the lakefront, windowless and austere. European architects in the early twentieth century studied photographs of them and called them the most original American contribution to architecture. Walter Gropius used images of the Buffalo grain elevators in his manifesto for the Bauhaus. Le Corbusier called them the first steps toward a new architecture. The elevators were built to store grain, and they changed how the world thinks about buildings.

It started with a merchant named Joseph Dart and an engineer named Robert Dunbar. By the eighteen forties, Buffalo's waterfront was chaos. Canal boats arrived constantly, loaded with grain from the interior. Hundreds of men called grain scoopers worked in the holds of the boats, shoveling grain by hand into buckets and lifting it by muscle alone into shoreside warehouses. It was exhausting, slow, and expensive.

Dart had been watching the process and thinking about Oliver Evans, an inventor from the previous generation who had theorized a mechanical solution. In eighteen forty-two, Dart and Dunbar built it: a steam-powered belt fitted with cups, a marine leg that could be lowered into a ship's hold, and the grain would be scooped mechanically and carried up into tall storage bins. They opened for business in June of eighteen forty-three.

In its first year of operation, Dart's elevator unloaded two hundred twenty-nine thousand bushels of grain. Other elevators followed, then more, then dozens. Within fifteen years, Buffalo had become the largest grain shipping port in the world, surpassing London, Odessa, and Rotterdam. The concrete storage towers that line the waterfront today are the mature form of what Dart and Dunbar invented here in eighteen forty-three.

The grain scoopers did not go quietly. They organized one of Buffalo's earliest and most durable labor unions, and for decades fought for control over who worked the surviving shoveling positions that the machines could not entirely replace. Their union survived into the nineteen nineties.