William J. Brown has written a book about the history of grain elevators in the U.S., and is now selling his book. I'm not promoting his book, per se, however I am letting my readers know about this in case they are interested in pursuing it. Click on the title to link to his blog about this book.
I'm passing this along as I'm glad to see that there are some writers out there who are willing to spend the time and effort to record this information for others to read.
Here's a quote from his book that applies to the Canadian prairies, as well, as far as I'm concerned:
"Frank Gohlke, a photographer of grain elevators, writes,
For me, the essential grain elevator view is obtained through the windshield of a car or truck while traveling on a highway in Kansas or Oklahoma or the Texas Panhandle. It is not a static view, but one that begins just as the elevator becomes visible above the center line, above five miles out of town, and continues until it disappears in the vibration in the rearview mirror. In the minutes that pass as the speck grows to colossal size and then shrinks to rejoin the horizon, many contradictory messages are created: we are powerful, we build for centuries, our monuments rival those of other heroic ages; we are insignificant, our hold on this landscape is tenuous, nature and time erode our greatest creations as if they were dust. What lingers i[n] the memory, though, is the image of a solitary, upright form in the middle distance of an endless plain."
