Cyrus Hall McCormick: His Life and Work

by Herbert Newton Casson

Associated with this transportation problem was the matter of storage. There was no sort of a building known to man, fifty years ago, in which a million bushels of wheat might be conveniently kept. An entirely new kind of building had to be invented. All the wheat barns were overflowing. All the warehouses were outgrown. The difficulty was to make a huge building that could be quickly filled and emptied. Then, at the precise moment when he was needed, an inventor, F. H. Peavey, appeared with a device for elevating grain—an endless carrier to which metal cups were fastened. From this idea the elevator was born.

MAMMOTH WHEAT-FIELD IN SOUTH DAKOTA WITH TWENTY HARVESTERS IN LINE

The first city that appreciated the usefulness of this new, unlovely building was Chicago. It became not only the home of the Reaper, but also the main storehouse of the wheat. It erected one after another of these mastodonic buildings until to-day thirty-six of them stand along the water-front, roomy enough to hold the entire crop of Holland, Sweden, Greece, Egypt, Mexico, and New Zealand. What these immense grain-bins have done for the prosperity of Chicago would require many books to tell completely. It was largely because of them that Chicago outgrew Berlin and became the central metropolis of North America, with twenty-six railways emptying their freight at her doors and seven thousand vessels a year arriving at her harbor.

At present Chicago has swung from wheat to corn and oats, and enabled Minneapolis to become the greatest actual wheat-storage city of the world. In Minneapolis the owning of elevators has become a profession. There are not only forty-four elevators in the city itself, but also forty elevator companies that have built more than two thousand elevators in the wheat States of the Northwest. The Jumbo of all elevators is here—a stupendous granary that holds 6,000,000 bushels, as much as may be reaped by two thousand self-binders from seven hundred square miles of land.

Of all American cities, there are only five others that can put roofs over 10,000,000 bushels of grain. Duluth-Superior stands at the head of these, with twice the storage capacity of New York. This double city, with the picturesque location, Duluth on her Minnesota hillside and Superior on her Wisconsin plain, has in recent years overtaken all competitors and is now the leading wheat-shipping port in the world. Buffalo comes next as an elevator city, having twenty-eight towering buildings of steel operated by the energy of Niagara Falls. Even this famous cataract helps a little in the making of cheap bread. New York follows closely after Buffalo; with Kansas City and St. Louis running neck and neck at quite a distance behind. It is an odd fact that there is not one elevator on the Pacific coast. Because of the rainless weather, the wheat is put into bags and piled outdoors until the day of shipment. This is an expensive method of handling, as the bags cost four cents apiece and no machine has as yet been invented that will pick up and handle a sack of grain.

The American elevator has now been very generally adopted as the ideal wheat-bin. Two Roumanian cities, Braila and Galatz, have suggested an improvement by using concrete instead of steel. And one Russian city, Novorossisk, on the Black Sea, has introduced a most original feature in the building of elevators by erecting a very large one a quarter of a mile back from the dock, because of the better view that this site affords of the harbor.

London has no elevators, and never has had, although it buys more wheat than any other city. It has six million mouths to feed, so that the grain is devoured as fast as it arrives. To give bread to London would take the entire crop of Indiana or Siberia. Neither are there any elevators of any importance in Paris, Berlin, or Antwerp. Whatever wheat arrives at these cities is either hurried to the mill or re-shipped. Wheat is too precious in Europe to be stored for a year or for two years, as may happen in Minnesota. Rotterdam has one elevator only and of moderate size. Neither Odessa nor Sulina have any of the large proportions, for the reasons that in Odessa the labor unions have an unconquerable prejudice against elevators, and in Sulina the grain is held only a short time and then forwarded elsewhere. This Sulina, as a glance at the map of Europe will show, is the loneliest of all the wheat-cities. It stands on a heap of gravel at the mouth of the Danube—an oasis of human life in a vast marshy wilderness. The children born there have never seen a railway; but 1,400 ships leave the stone docks of Sulina every year laden with enough wheat to feed London, Paris, and Berlin. To find the exact reverse of Sulina, we must go to Buenos Ayres—the premier wheat-city of South America and the gayest of them all. Built up at first by the cattle trade, and now depending mainly upon wheat, this superb city has become the topmost pinnacle of South American luxury and refinement. It has several new elevators, erected by the railway companies.

After the Reaper, the Railway, the Steamship, and the Elevator, came the Exchange. This, too, came first in Chicago, in its modern form. There was one little grain Exchange in the Italian city of Genoa, several centuries ago, and England points back to 1747 as the year when her first Corn Exchange was born. But it was the Exchange in Chicago, started by thirteen men in 1848, that first came into its full growth and became an arena of international forces.

A wheat Exchange is to-day much more than a meeting-place for brokers. It is a mechanism. It is a news bureau—a parliament—a part of the whispering-gallery of the world. It not only provides a market where wheat can at once be bought and sold, but it obtains for both buyer and seller all the news from everywhere about the wheat, so that no bargain may be made in the dark. Before Exchanges were organized there were times when a farmer would drive twenty miles to the nearest town with a load of wheat, and find no one to buy it. Even in Chicago, in the early forties, a farmer ran the risk of not being able to trade his wheat for a few groceries.