Alberta’s Wooden Country Grain Elevators

This post was originally published on RETROactive on March 6th, 2012. Farmers across the province will soon be busy with harvest so we thought it appropriate to highlight a previous post associated with Alberta’s agricultural past. Please note that these statistics are from 2012.

The twentieth century saw the rise and fall – literally – of the wooden country grain elevator in Alberta. As rail lines spread across the province, grain elevators sprouted like mushrooms after a spring rain. The high water mark for wooden country grain elevators was in 1934. New elevators were added in every decade, but this has been exceeded by the rate of demolition or closure ever since. Check out the following “index” of Alberta’s wooden country elevators, called “elevators” for short in this list.

Number of elevators in Alberta:

• in 1934:  1,781
• in 1951:  1,651
• in 1982:  979
• in 1997: 327
• in 2005: 156
• in 2012 on railway rights-of-way:  130

Number of communities with:

• at least one elevator:  95
• 2 or more elevators:  26
• 3 or more elevators:  7
• 4 or more elevators:  1 (Warner)

Additional statistics:

• Number of elevators in Alberta’s longest row:  6
• Oldest remaining elevator: 1905 (Raley)
• Number of remaining elevators that pre-date 1910:  3 (Raley, St. Albert, De Winton)
• Newest remaining elevator: 1988 (Woodgrove)
• Decade with the largest number of surviving elevators:  1920s (33)
• Decade with the second largest number of surviving elevators:  1980s (26)
• Decade with the fewest (after pre-1910) number of surviving elevators:  1940s (5)
• Number of elevators that have been designated a Provincial Historic Resource (PHR):  13
• Number of communities with at least one elevator designated as a PHR:  10
• Oldest designated elevator: 1906 (St. Albert)
• Newest designated elevator:  Leduc (1978)

For a list of communities in Alberta with designated and non-designated elevators, please click here.

Please Note:

• Grain elevators that have been moved off railway rights-of-way – to a farmyard or a museum, for instance – are not included in these statistics.
• Grain elevators located on railway rights-of-way where the rails have been torn up are included in these statistics.
• Concrete or steel elevators are not included.
• Elevators used for other purposes, such as seed cleaning or fertilizer storage, are not included.
• Most of these elevators were last documented by the Heritage Survey in 2005. It is possible that some of the elevators on the list are now gone.

Additional Information:

• View records for designated grain elevators on the Alberta Register of Historic Places.
• Explore the online Heritage Survey database, which has records for over 700 grain elevators.
• Read “Alberta’s Grain Elevators: A brief history of a prairie icon”, a Government of Alberta booklet, on the Alberta Grain Elevator Society website.

Written by: Dorothy Field, Heritage Survey Program Coordinator