The Transportation Business.
In the matter of transportation it may be interesting to learn how a consignment of wheat is “handled” from the time it leaves the field in Manitoba, where it is grown, until it reaches its destination in Liverpool or London. When there were only a few hundred thousand bushels to be sent to the seaboard, the means of transport were very simple and primitive. It was carried on men’s backs from one conveyance to another, and floated down rivers or shallow canals in small boats or on rafts of timber. But when the thousands became millions the problem of cheap transportation became a serious one. American ingenuity rose to the occasion and invented the most marvellous of labour-saving appliances—THE GRAIN ELEVATOR.
C. P. R. GRAIN ELEVATOR AT FORT WILLIAM, ONT.
The farmer sells his crop of wheat to the grain-dealer, and carts it, say, to Brandon, where the purchaser takes delivery of it at his elevator. Let us examine this thing somewhat minutely, taking by way of illustration one of the elevators belonging to the Canadian Pacific Railway Company at Montreal. It is a medium-sized one, having capacity for storing about 600,000 bushels of grain. The same company’s elevators at Fort William and Port Arthur are much larger, having capacity for 1,500,000 bushels. In Chicago and Buffalo there are elevators of three millions of bushels capacity; but, whether larger or smaller, in their main features they are all alike.
The elevator is a wooden structure of great strength. Its massive stone foundations rest on piles imbedded in concrete. The framework is so thoroughly braced and bolted together as to give it the rigidity of a solid cube, enabling it to resist the enormous pressure to which it is subjected when filled with 18,000 tons of wheat. The building is 210 feet long, 80 feet wide, and 142 feet in height from basement to the peak of the roof. Including the steam-engine (built at the C. P. R. works) of 240 horse-power, the entire cost of this elevator was $150,000. It consists of three distinct compartments—for receiving, storing, and delivering grain. On the ground floor are two lines of rails by which the cars have ingress and egress. The general appearance of this flat is that of a bewildering array of ponderous posts and beams, shafting, cog-wheels, pulleys and belts, blocks and tackle, chutes, and the windlasses for hauling in and out the cars, for a locomotive with its dangerous sparks may not cross the threshold. Beneath this, in the basement, are the receiving tanks, thirty-five feet apart from centre to centre, corresponding to the length of the cars. Of these there are nine, enabling that number of cars to be simultaneously unloaded. This is quickly done by a shovel worked by machinery, with the aid of two men, the grain falling through an iron grating in the floor into the tank. The elevator has nine “legs.” The leg is an upright box, 12 inches by 24 inches, extending from the bottom of the tank to the top of the building; inside of it is a revolving belt with buckets attached 15½ inches apart. The belt is 256 feet long, and as it makes 36 revolutions per minute, each bucket containing one-third of a bushel, each leg is able to raise 5,250 bushels per hour.[56] A car is unloaded and its contents hoisted into the upper regions in fifteen minutes. When all the legs are at work 30,000 bushels are handled in an hour.
The four-story house on top of the granary contains a number of different mechanisms. In the uppermost flat the leg’s revolving belt turns round a pulley and discharges the grain into a receiving hopper on the next floor. From this it is withdrawn to the weighing hopper, nicely balanced on a Fairbanks beam-scale, having a capacity for 30,000 pounds or 500 bushels of wheat, which is weighed with as much exactitude as is a pound of tea by the grocer. At either end of this room there is a separating machine in which the grain can be thoroughly cleansed by the removal of smut and dust. Underneath is the distributing room, with jointed pipes leading to the storage bins, of which there are one hundred, each 50 feet deep and 12 feet square, calculated to hold 6,000 bushels each. The process of withdrawing the grain from the bins, strange to say, is a repetition of that just described. It must go down into the cellar, and up again to the attic, and pass through the weighing machine and thence to the car, the barge, or the ship. A car of 600 bushels can be loaded in three minutes. The most singular part of the whole apparatus is the “carrier” by which the grain is conveyed from the elevator to the vessel lying at the wharf, 260 feet off. The carrier is an endless four-ply rubber belt, 515 feet long and 36 inches wide, upon which the grain is dropped and carried to its destination. The difficulty of comprehending why the grain is not shaken off that flat, rapidly revolving belt is not lessened by the explanation given, that it is held in place by the concentrative attraction of the particles in motion. But from whatever cause, the grain clings to the belt, and may be carried in this way any distance, and in all manner of directions, turning sharp corners and even going over the roofs of houses if they stand in the way. The elevator in question delivers by “carrier” from 8,000 to 10,000 bushels an hour. There are over 50 such elevators in New York, only of much larger capacity; Buffalo has 52, with a storage capacity of over 15,000,000 bushels; Chicago, 21; Duluth and Superior, 9 each. There are elevators in Buffalo that can take grain out of a vessel at the rate of 25,000 bushels an hour.
A Duluth paper of May 21st, 1898, says: “Globe elevator No. 1 carries the broom for rapid loading this year, and the record made yesterday has probably never been equalled. The steamer Queen City loaded there yesterday morning, taking 185,000 bushels in 180 minutes.”
Now, suppose that an order has reached Brandon for a shipment of 220,000 bushels of wheat,[57] to be forwarded to Montreal via the St. Lawrence route. The initial cost of receiving, storing for a given time and delivery from the Brandon elevator is three cents per bushel. It must be hauled from Brandon to Fort William, a distance of 559 miles by railway. The consignment is the produce of 11,000 acres and weighs 6,600 tons. It will load 330 box-cars, each containing 40,000 pounds. As each car weighs about 25,000 pounds, the entire weight to be moved by rail will be 10,725 tons. Until quite recently, twenty cars of wheat made up an average train load, but with the powerful locomotives now in use twice that number may be taken at a load. A safe estimate for this particular shipment will be ten trains of thirty-three cars each, the gross weight of engine, tender and train being about 1,100 tons.[58] The cost of transport from Brandon to Fort William, at the summer rate of 19 cents per 100 pounds, will be 11.40 cents per bushel. By means of the elevator at Fort William it is transhipped to lake vessels. A large propeller takes on board 70,000 bushels; the balance is stored away in three barges containing 50,000 bushels each. The propeller takes the trio in tow and proceeds on its long voyage of 1,200 miles through Lake Superior, the “Soo” Canal, lakes Huron and Erie, the Welland Canal and Lake Ontario to Kingston, in seven days. The cost of transportation from Fort William to Kingston is from three to four cents per bushel, and to Montreal two cents more. At Kingston floating elevators come alongside the propeller and her consorts, and quickly transfer their cargoes into lighters carrying from 20,000 to 30,000 bushels each.[59] The fleet of nine or ten river barges is towed down the St. Lawrence, passing through the Cornwall, Beauharnois and Lachine canals to Montreal, 1,940 miles from Brandon by this route. They are laid alongside the ocean steamers in pairs, one opposite the forehatch and the other at the afterhatch, and their contents are poured into the big ship at the rate of 8,000 to 10,000 bushels per hour. The average rate to Liverpool is about 5¼ cents per bushel, bringing up the total cost of transportation from Brandon to Britain to, say, 22¼ cents per bushel. The first shipment of wheat from Manitoba to Britain was made in October, 1877.
Mr. Hugh McLennan, the president of the Montreal Transportation Company, is also one of the most extensive shippers of grain in Canada. No better illustration can be found anywhere of the man who is the architect of his own fortune. Mr. McLennan was born in the County of Glengarry in 1825. His father’s family came from Ross-shire, Scotland, in 1802, and his mother’s family were United Empire Loyalists, who settled in Glengarry at the close of the American War of Independence.
After serving some years in the hardware business in Montreal, Mr. McLennan joined the mail steamer Canada, as purser, under Captain Lawless. In 1850 he started business on his own account in Kingston, as wharfinger and shipping agent. During that season he united with some others in organizing a steamboat line to run between Kingston and Montreal, in the furtherance of which enterprise he removed to Montreal in 1851, adding the business of general shipping agent. In the year 1854 he was joined by his elder brother John, when they entered extensively into the grain trade, Mr. McLennan going to Chicago in connection with that business. In 1867 he returned to Montreal, and organized the Montreal Transportation Company, of which he has been president to the present time.
Mr. McLennan’s name soon became identified with many of the leading enterprises of the city, as well as in its educational and benevolent institutions. He still continues his active connection with the transportation and grain export business, and by reason of his long connection has become an acknowledged authority in everything pertaining to the past history of these important branches of Canadian trade. He is an ex-president of the Board of Trade, and represented that organization upon the Harbour Board for a quarter of a century, resigning the position during the present season. He is a director of the Bank of Montreal, a governor of McGill University, and of the Montreal General Hospital, and is treasurer of the Sailors’ Institute. He is also an active member of the American Presbyterian Church.
A large proportion of the wheat grown in the Western States and in Canada is made into flour and transported in that form to eastern and foreign markets. Minneapolis, in the State of Minnesota, claims to be the greatest flour manufacturing centre in the world. Its milling capacity is said to be 54,800 barrels daily. Its actual output in 1895 was 10,581,633 barrels. Although Canada may not compare with Minneapolis in its annual output of flour, she claims to have the largest individual miller in the world, in the person of W. W. Ogilvie, of Montreal. Mr. William Watson Ogilvie was born at St. Michel, near Montreal, April 14th, 1836, being descended from a younger brother of the Earl of Angus, who, some centuries ago, was rewarded with the lands of Ogilvie, in Banffshire, and assumed the name of the estate. His immediate ancestors belonged to Stirlingshire, Scotland, his grandfather having come to this country in the year 1800.
The milling business now represented by Mr. Ogilvie was begun by his grandfather, who, in 1801, erected a mill at Jacques Cartier, near Quebec, and also one at the Lachine Rapids, in 1808. In 1860 he became a member of the firm of A. W. Ogilvie & Co., then formed, whose transactions in grain soon became very extensive, resulting in the building of the “Glenora Mills,” at Montreal, and others of large capacity at Goderich, Seaforth and Winnipeg. On the death of Mr. John Ogilvie, in 1888, Senator A. W. Ogilvie, having retired in 1874, Mr. W. W. became the sole member of the firm, and has since proved himself a man of marvellous executive ability. He went to Hungary to see the roller process at work, where it came into use in 1868, and was one of the first to introduce it into this country. He acquired by purchase the famous Gould Mills in Montreal, at a cost of $250,000, thus adding 1,100 barrels to his daily milling capacity, which, at the present time, is about 9,000 barrels a day. The annual output of Mr. Ogilvie’s mills is about 2,500,000 barrels. About 30 per cent. of that amount is exported to different European countries; and, recently, a demand has arisen in Japan, Australia, and even in the Fiji Islands, for “Ogilvie’s Hungarian flour.” The balance is sold in all parts of the Dominion. Mr. Ogilvie purchases between four and five millions of bushels of wheat annually, and is rich in elevators, having as many as sixty-nine of these for his own special use in various parts of the country. In carrying on his extensive business he occasionally charters whole fleets of lake steamers and barges, and it is said of him that he is as fair in his business methods as he is generous in his charities. Mr. Ogilvie is a director of the Bank of Montreal, ex-President of the Montreal Board of Trade, and largely interested in several of the leading commercial interests of Canada.