Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

The government-owned wheat elevator at Port Arthur is the world’s largest grain storage plant. The greater part of all the wheat grown on the western prairies comes to this city or to Fort William for shipment down the lakes.

The beautiful falls of Kakabeka are almost as high as those of Niagara. They generate hydro-electric power that is carried to Fort William, twenty-three miles away, to light the city and run its factories.

“The lake freighters are like no other craft I have ever seen. Between the bow and the stern is a vast stretch of deck, containing hatches into which wheat or ore is loaded. This boat is six hundred feet long.”

Fort William and Port Arthur are rivals. Port Arthur was built first. Formerly the site of an Indian village, it was founded by the Canadian Pacific Railway. Shortly after its birth the baby town decided to tax that great corporation. This made the railway people angry, and it is said that the then president of the line decided to discipline the infant by moving his lake terminus to Fort William, which was then a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post. He thereupon shifted the railway shops to Fort William, saying that he would yet see the grass grow in the streets of Port Arthur. For a time the grass did grow, but later the Canadian Northern road, now a part of the Canadian National, was built through, and Port Arthur now has traffic from both roads. Most of the business of the Canadian Pacific is still done at Fort William.

Fort William and Port Arthur are connected by a street-car line and the land between them has been so divided into town lots that they may some day unite the two cities. Both places believe in municipal ownership, and each manages its own electric lights, telephones, and waterworks. Fort William is the larger, Port Arthur having four or five thousand less people.

During my stay here I have gone through some of the wheat elevators. Fort William has twenty-two and Port Arthur ten, with a total storage capacity between them of fifty-six million bushels. Plans are under way to make this enormous capacity even greater. The terminal elevator of the Canadian National Railways, built on the very edge of Lake Superior, is the largest in the world. It consists of two huge barn-like divisions between which are more than one hundred and fifty herculean grain tanks. These are mighty cylinders of tiles bound together with steel, each of which is twenty-one feet in diameter and will hold twenty-three thousand bushels of wheat. This great tank forest covers several acres, and rises to the height of an eight-story apartment house.

The storage capacity of the elevator is eight million bushels of wheat, which is more than enough to supply a city the size of Detroit with flour the year round. The elevator can unload six hundred cars of wheat, or about six hundred thousand bushels, in a single day, including the weighing and binning. It has scales that weigh forty-three tons at a time.

The wheat comes to the elevator in cars, each of which holds a thousand or fifteen hundred bushels. By a car-dumping machine the grain is unloaded into the basement of the huge buildings at the sides of the tanks. From there it is raised to the top of the elevator in bushel buckets on endless chains at the rate of six hundred and fifty bushels a minute, or more than ten every second. It is next weighed, and then carried on wide belt conveyors into the storage towers. The machinery is so arranged that by pressing a button or moving a lever a stream of wheat will flow to any part of the great granary. The grain runs just like water, save that the belts conduct it uphill or down.