Wheat Kings: Vanishing Landmarks of the Canadian Prairies

Michael Payne is head of the Research and Publications Program at the
Historic Sites and Archives Service, Alberta Community Development, and
the co-author of A Narrative History of Fort Dunvegan.

Joni Mitchell, a prairie person before she became a popular culture
icon, once sang that “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s
gone.” This is about as good a definition of historical nostalgia as
you will find, and an apt comment on the fate of western Canada’s
remaining grain elevators.

Once ubiquitous symbols of prairie settlement and an agricultural
economy, the classic wooden grain elevator is fast
disappearing—replaced by concrete “high-throughput” grain-handling
facilities, inland terminals, and other new behemoths of the rural
landscape. The latter, despite their economies of scale, have little
connection to specific communities, and they somehow symbolize not
settlement but depopulation, and not progress but the end of a way of
life. Within a generation, the old wooden grain elevator will seem as
rare as sod houses and as incomprehensible as root cellars. They will
survive only as historic sites or by being moved into local heritage
villages. In short, they will become almost as rare as the grain storage
sheds they replaced.

This book combines several short essays on the disappearing grain
elevator with many nostalgic, and rather melancholy, photographs of
elevators looking abandoned, elevators being torn down, elevators left
behind when towns closed up, old grain cars, and rusting equipment. The
photographs are the main appeal of what is essentially a coffee-table
book, and as historical documents themselves they capture the end of a
fascinating chapter in western Canadian history.