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"Cleiv?"
"Nope."
"Collins or Lodgegrass?"
"Nope. Those are gone, too. But there's
one in Wyola that still has the logo on the
north side of the elevator," Bruce Selyem
said.
Bruce is an authority on grain elevators
and president of the Country Grain Eleva-
tor Historical Society. Making rounds to
visit the state's old elevators with his wife,
Barbara Krupp-Selyem, he says that fewer
are standing every year. As I spoke to him
about those still standing, he said the ones
in Saco and Hinsdale have been down for a
while, but Rapelje still had the four the that
graced the cover of their book, Old Time
Grain Elevators II.
Across the Great Plains in both the U.S.
and Canada, up to 30,000 prairie sky-
scrapers dotted the landscape during their
heyday in the 1920s and 1930s. Today only
about a third of the old wooden grain eleva-
tors are left.
Anything over ten stories tall qualified
as a skyscraper in 1842 when Joseph Dart
and Robert Dunbar first invented them. Once
grain crops shifted from purely local use to
distribution to a broader market, a facility to
sort and store grain became a necessity.
Elevators spread from east to west,
springing up next to railroad tracks that
found their way into every coulee in Mon-
tana. As the main rail lines marched into
the state, the Northern Pacific following the
Yellowstone River and the Great Northern
on the Hi-Line, they dropped off supplies to
build the massive wooden structures.
Just the lower portions, called cribs,
required 300,000 board-feet of lumber and
were built like a log cabin with overlapping
corners. Atop the crib, the headhouse was
frame construction. The belt and bucket
grain conveyor system extended from the
by TERESA OTTO photos by BRUCE AND BARBARA SELYEM
Montana's Prairie Skyscrapers
HOBSON
WYOLA
