Cathedral of Wheat: Enid's Grain Elevator Skyline

Drive into Enid from any direction and what you see first are not water towers or church steeples, it is the grain elevators. Massive concrete cylinders rising fifty, seventy, a hundred feet above the Oklahoma plain, so numerous and so clustered that they form a skyline of their own. Enid has more grain storage capacity than almost any other city in the United States, and for most of the twentieth century it claimed the title without qualification.

Enid itself was born on September sixteenth, eighteen ninety-three, in the largest single-day land run in American history. More than one hundred thousand settlers raced to claim forty-two thousand homesteads in the Cherokee Outlet that day, and by nightfall a city was staking itself out on the treeless plain. The settlers who stayed were farmers, and the land around them grew hard red winter wheat in quantities that staggered imagination.

The elevators in the Terminal Grain Elevators Historic District were built between nineteen twenty-five and nineteen fifty-four, concrete towers that replaced earlier wooden structures as the scale of the wheat trade outgrew every previous container. In nineteen thirty-eight, at the depth of the Great Depression, Enid set a record of fourteen thousand one hundred and eighty-five train loads of wheat in a single year. By nineteen sixty-two, Garfield County's storage capacity had reached seventy-five million bushels. By nineteen eighty-seven it peaked at eighty million bushels, the largest grain storage capacity of any city in the United States and the third largest in the world.

The elevators are quiet now compared to their peak years. The nineteen eighty grain embargo and drought closed several. But the towers still stand along the railroad corridors north of downtown, added to the National Register in two thousand nine. They are the physical record of a century in which Oklahoma turned the Cherokee Outlet into the wheat capital of the Great Plains.