ENDANGERED LIST
Wooden grain elevators, like this one at Kronau, southeast of Regina, have been put on the National Trust for Canada’s endangered places list for this year.
Once a prairie icon, wooden grain elevators have been disappearing from the Saskatchewan landscape for years now. This year they made the National Trust for Canada’s Top 10 Endangered Places list.
“It’s unusual for us to enlist a whole class of buildings, but we really felt that in the case of grain elevators so many have been lost that just identifying one or two of them wouldn’t have the appropriate impact,” said Natalie Bull, executive director with the National Trust.
The list is compiled every year by the group, and takes into consideration the historical impact of the places that are nominated.
“What’s important about grain elevators as a symbol is their history is so intimately connected to the grain economy and that their loss also signals other important changes: rural depopulation, the loss of the railways,” Bull said. “It’s really part of a bigger picture of social change and technological change that I think we just need to think hard about what it means to our cultural landscape.”
From 1996 to 2000, photographer Tim Van Hoth travelled across the Prairies trying to document as many wooden grain elevators as possible. He managed to photograph 600 elevators — at one time there used to be 6,600 elevators across the Prairies.
“It was inevitable for the prairie landscape to be eradicated of the grain elevators just due to the fact that we no longer needed them everywhere like they were. But it went too far,” Van Hoth said.
He is happy to see the grain elevators included on the list; but he thinks they should have been included 10 years ago.
“When you get into these buildings and you really start to understand the history of the grain elevator, there was some real keepers, and now they’re long gone,” Van Hoth said.
In 2010 the Ministry of Tourism, Parks, Culture and Sport along with the Saskatchewan Heritage Foundation released a newsletter entitled “Grain Elevator Conservation.”
The newsletter states that at one time there were approximately 3,300 elevators operating in the province. As the time of the newsletter’s publication, there were just over 420 grain elevators, terminals, and flour mills still standing, down from 800 in 1999.
Since then, the government has not done another count of the elevators, but it does see making the endangered places list as a good thing.
“Awareness can encourage more discussion, and maybe that will generate some more communitybased opportunities for discussions between those owners and the rail companies and others that are involved in it to see more of these things protected, preserved, conserved and continue a life in the community,” said Bruce Dawson, manager of historic places in the heritage conservation branch of the ministry.