In Canada the term elevator row refers to a row of four or more wood-crib prairie grain elevators.
In the early pioneer days of Western Canada's Prairie towns, when a good farming spot being settled, many people wanted to make money by building their own grain elevators, this brought in droves of private grain companies. Towns boasted dozens of elevator companies which all stood in a row along the railway tracks. If a town was lucky enough to have two railways, it was to be known as the next Montreal. In many elevator rows there would be two or more elevators of the same company. Small towns bragged of their large elevator rows in promotional pamphlets to attract settlers. With so much competition in the 1920s consolidation began almost immediately and many small companies were merged or absorbed into larger companies.
In the mid 1990s with the cost of grain so low many private elevator companies once again had to merge. This time causing thousands of "prairie sentinels" to be torn down. Because so many grain elevators have been torn down, Canada has only two surviving elevator rows, one located in Warner, Alberta, and the other in Inglis, Manitoba. The Inglis elevator row has been protected as National Historic Sites of Canada, while the Warner elevator row remains unprotected.
Read more about this topic: Grain Elevator
Famous quotes containing the words elevator and/or row:
“The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen
The lobby zombies they knowing what
The whistling elevator man he knowing
The winking bellboy knowing
Everybody knowing! I’d be almost inclined not to do anything!”
—Gregory Corso (b. 1930)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)