Abandoned Grain Elevator, Buffalo NY

H-O Oats Elevator, Buffalo New York

Date added: June 29, 2023 Categories:

H-O mill building elevation, reinforced concrete section (1994)

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The H-O Company Elevator on Perry and Fulton Streets on the south side of downtown Buffalo has a long history of operation, both in terms of the site and of the companies that founded and ran the elevator and cereal production facility. The original grain elevator and mill belonged to Edward Ellsworth & Company. In 1896, Ellsworth added a brick and frame elevator to his typical wood cereal mill. Between 1896 and 1908 Ellsworth appended incidental buildings for storage, laboratory facilities, and office space. The operation remained relatively small but reasonably prosperous.

Ellsworth entered the cereal and flour trade as an important brand-name manufacturer through the acquisition of another well-known producer, H-O Oats. Alexander Hornsby established H-O (Hornsby's Oatmeal) in Craigville, New York, in the 1870s. At the founder's death, Ellsworth bought his mill and, in 1890, relocated the business to Lockport, Illinois. The new location on the Chicago & Michigan Canal was closer to raw grain suppliers and transport access to Lake Michigan. In 1892-1893 Ellsworth moved to Buffalo in the hope of capturing the east coast markets. His business began under his own company name; the cereal was once again marketed under the familiar H-O label. H-O was a pioneer in the manufacture of prepared breakfast food. Under Ellsworth's control, the company diversified to manufacture both flour and feed and to expand the consumer line. In addition to H-O Oats, Ellsworth developed Force Toasted Wheat Flakes and Presto Self-Rising Flour.

In 1907 Ellsworth restructured the company, changing the name from Edward Ellsworth & Co. to Edward Ellsworth Company. The slight name change reflected his consolidation of ownership. The latter company "bought" the assets of the first company for $2 million. By this date, Ellsworth had operations in Buffalo and Cedar Rapids, Iowa where be manufactured Pawnee Cereal. The expanded company was to be financed by a bond issue backed by a mortgage on the property secured from Fidelity Trust Company which thereby acquired two seats on Ellsworth's board of directors. The company lasted only two years before it was bought by Hecker, an offshoot of a New York City milling company briefly based in Buffalo.

In 1920 Buffalonian H. P. Werner, Hecker H-O president, renamed the local operation The H-O Company. It operated as the H-O Mill until 1925, when it was bought out by Standard Milling Company and renamed Hecker H-O once again. Standard Milling was a financial holding company established in 1900 after the collapse of United States Flour Milling Company. At its inception, the new firm subsumed several key milling companies and began acquiring others, including H-O Cereal Company. The purchase was effected through Standard's Hecker-Jones-Jewell subsidiary which had designs on other Buffalo properties. The acquisition was predicted to make Buffalo a leading cereal producer since Standard's marketing operations were vastly more extensive than Ellsworth's. Further, the machinery located in Hecker's New York City plant was to be moved to the mill with the Hecker sales offices relocating as well.

The H-O Mill had been enlarged over the previous decade, and Hecker planned to expand still further. H-O had added a four-story milling area in 1912 and a modern concrete and steel grain elevator two years later. Storage areas and office space were also enlarged. Once Hecker took control, it moved all of the office operations off-site to a commercial building, thereby expanding actual production space.

In 1929 the "silent partners" behind Standard Milling acquired dominant control. The Gold Dust Company took active ownership of Standard, Hecker, and H-O, three among several subsidiaries. In 1929 Gold Dust built a mammoth grain elevator for Standard. Two years later it planned a 600,000-bushel elevator addition to H-O (still known locally as Hecker H-O) that would substantially increase the mill's capacity. From the time Gold Dust took active control of H-O until 1983, the elevator was essentially owned and operated by the same company. However, the company name was changed every few years as corporate mergers, divestitures, and reorganizations altered the focus of production and identity. Regardless of owner, Buffalo residents stubbornly continued to refer to the cereal mill and elevator simply as the "H-o", No one could keep up with the otherwise confusing corporate identities.

In 1931, the same year the company built the 600,000-bushel addition, Gold Dust merged with General Foods and adopted the name of one of Gold Dust's main proprietary lines, Best Foods, Inc. Five years later, in 1936, the Hecker name was once again raised to corporate prominence. In 1942 Hecker acquired the remaining 29 percent portion of Best Foods that was owned by General Foods, and in December of that year the company was once again named Best Foods. In 1945 the Best Foods Corporation split in two and a large portion of the milling operations was acquired by a new spin-off called, predictably, Standard Milling Co. Standard's headquarters was located in Chicago until 1952, when it moved to Kansas City, Missouri. Standard Milling took over Buffalo's large Standard Elevator but left the H-O Elevator and cereal/flour mill to Best Foods.

In 1969 Best Foods merged with Corn Products Company, a producer of corn syrups and "wet milled" corn commodities such as dextrose and other corn derivatives. Although the company always located production in areas close to the source of supply, the headquarters was in New Jersey and the dominant control was held by Wall Street financial interests. The merger with Best Foods was a common procedure since Corn Products' growth was always obtained through acquisition rather than actual investment in new facilities or processes. Best Foods was one of Corn Products' Major additions and gave Corn Products Company an infusion of branded products including H-O cereal. The Buffalo elevator and mill continued to produce the same line of cereals and other items as it had for decades under Hecker and Standard. The focus of production remained on varieties of oat cereals and Presto Self-Rising Cake Flour. Quick Oats comprised 49 percent of output, with old-fashioned oats adding another 9 percent. As a railroad-based elevator, H-O bought raw oats from other Buffalo elevators and transshipped the raw commodities to its own elevator and mill.

CPC International, as it came to be called, owned and operated the Buffalo elevator until the company's shift away from milling to processed consumer food lines made cereal operation a less attractive part of the company. In 1983, CPC ended eighty-eight years of H-O oat production at the site, nearly sixty years under the same company. The H-O facility was sold to Gary Rammacher, whose forebears had been part of several prosperous waterfront elevator operations at Concrete-Central. Two years after Rammacher began his tenure as a miller, the elevator was sold to All Star Tire Warehouse for tire storage. The next year H-O burned in a catastrophic fire that left only the massive storage tanks and a portion of the milling area relatively intact. The site is now abandoned and derelict.

Building Description

Developments at the H-O Oats site began in 1893 with the construction of a wood-framed food mill, and a wood-framed feed mill for E. Ellsworth. These developments took place along what was to become the northern side of the site. The building permit for the construction of both mills was issued in 1893. The feed mill measured 75' x 80' and the food mill to the west 100' x 60'. A building permit was issued on September 28^th, 1893, for the construction of an elevator to the east of the mill. The elevator measured 85' x 40' and was of wood crib-binned construction with exterior brick walling and a high cupola extending the length of the building. The original complex survived until the site was abandoned and the buildings burned. Both subsequent elevators were supplied by overhead conveyor gantries from the railroad unloading facilities provided by this elevator.

The next major additions to the site came in 1912, with a four-story "brick factory" and a brick addition to the elevator. The five-story extension measuring 120' x 80' occupies the southwest corner of the site. The building, which served as a mixing and packaging facility, is concrete-framed and floored with brick wall paneling. The total capacity of the elevator became 105,000 bushels. A 70' high oat drier house was added to the south of the original elevator at an unknown date.

The earliest surviving grain bins on the site date from 1914. This "concrete and steel grain storage" consists of four free-standing steel bins rising from a concrete foundation slab. The bins are approximately 23' in diameter and 60' tall with a capacity of 20,000 bushels each. They are located to the south of the original elevator beyond the oat drier house. In 1928 another large addition was made to the east of the 1912 structure. The seven-story concrete-framed, brick-paneled building measuring 80' x 70' served as a store and warehouse.

In 1931 a building permit was issued for the construction of the concrete elevator on the southeast corner of the site that would come to dominate the complex. The elevator was built by the Monarch Engineering Company of Buffalo to the in-house design of H. R. Wait. In basic concept, it is typical of his work and features a full basement with spread bins rising from an overall bin slab. The high, 125' bins are also characteristic of his later designs, although they are unusually narrow. The building is L-shaped in plan, as the 1914 steel bins lie immediately to the northwest of the elevator and fit between its two wings. The eastern elevation is 82' long and the southern elevation 110'. This is the only Buffalo example of a Wait-designed elevator with interlocking bin rows. The basement works were completed using conventional formwork, and the bins were slip formed, probably using the threaded jacking rod method favored by the Monarch Company. The structure was complete and operational by the fall of 1931.

The elevator has a capacity of 580,000 bushels. The storage is provided in eighteen main bins, six interspace bins, nine outerspace bins, and two corner bins two-thirds the circumference of the main bins. The main bins are 15' in inner diameter and arranged on 26'-6" centers in interlocking rows. The easterly wing of bins consists of four interlocking rows of three whole bins and the southerly wing of three interlocking rows of two bins. The alignment and spacing of bins is maintained between the two wings. The main bins are spread diagonally and joined by diagonal link walls. This geometry determines that the outer space bins are of large volume and extend back to the wall of the inner rows of main bins, where they interlock with the outer rows of main bins. The northeast and southwest corner bins of the east wing are incomplete cylinders, effectively corner outer spaces occupying the area between two whole bins. The interspace bins are of conventional form, although the diagonal link walls result in the axis of their plan being rotated through 45. The bins rise to 125' above the bin slab, and the wall thickness is 6-1/2" in the bin walls and 9" in the link walls. The reinforcing details are not known.

The bin hoppering is provided by mortar-faced slag concrete laid to form a cone above the bin slab. The spouting is via centrally located conical steel hoppers set into the bin slab. The basement provides full headroom. The bin slab is supported by mushroom-headed columns arranged in three rows of five below the east wing, and two rows of three below the south wing. All are equidistantly spaced and located beneath every link wall. Rectangular wall pillars are incorporated into the inner face of the basement exterior wall and are located below the intersection of main and outer space bin walls. The concrete basement wall is pierced by elongated windows between every pillar. The elevator is built on a foundation of wood piles capped by a reinforced concrete foundation slab. The bin floor is of reinforced concrete on I-beams and extends beyond the bin line to form wide straight eaves. The bin floor is protected by an overall single-story gallery of structural steel clad in gypsum boarding and roofed with a concrete slab. The 24' x 28' workhouse extending above the gallery of the southern wing to a height of 186' resembles the gallery in construction.

Buffalo's Grain Elevators

Great Northern Elevator
Standard Elevator
Wollenberg Grain & Seed Elevator
Concrete-Central Elevator
Washburn Crosby Elevator
Connecting Terminal Elevator
Spencer Kellogg Elevator
Cooperative Grange League Federation
Electric Elevator
American Elevator
Perot Elevator
Lake & Rail Elevator
Marine "A" Elevator
Superior Elevator
Saskatchewan Cooperative Elevator
Urban Elevator
H-O Oats Elevator
Kreiner Malting Elevator
Meyer Malting Elevator
Eastern States Elevator
Buffalo Cereal Elevator
Cloverleaf Milling co. Elevator
Dakota Elevator
Dellwood Elevator
Great Eastern Elevator
Iron Elevator
John Kam Malting Elevator
Monarch Elevator
Pratt Foods Elevator
Ralston Purina Elevator
Riverside Malting Elevator