O.G. Bradshaw Grain Elevator, Kimball South Dakota
Oscar George Bradshaw came to Kimball around 1908 and built the wooden 20,000-bushel capacity elevator that year on the far western end of the established elevator row. The structure went up to thirty-six feet on the main section and to forty-eight feet at the top of the cupola. It used both heavy, post-and-beam construction with large timbers as structural elements and also used processed and standardized dimension lumber for sheathing and the cribbed bins. The elevator had nine bins and a wooden leg with motorized belt, a drive bay with scales below, and a connected office that housed the six-horsepower gasoline engine below. By 1917, the Bradshaw Elevator had cleaning machinery and converted from the gasoline engine to a five-horsepower electric motor in the headhouse, likely around the time that the town's light company began operations in 1914. Sometime between 1917 and 1928, an adjoining rectangular building was constructed on the eastern side to store additional grain, although it was later removed. In 1956, the elevator had its shingles and siding replaced in-kind by R.P. Korzan (who had an active local construction company in the mid-twentieth century), Tom Lutz, and George Gross. The Bradshaw Elevator is rare in that it was never modified from its original wood construction to metal siding, and that its office is also wood frame and attached to the elevator through the drive bay.
Bradshaw was born in 1872 in the Rochester area in Olmstead County, Minnesota and, in 1898, had worked in a wheat mill in Blooming Prairie, Minnesota. In 1902, he came to South Dakota and gained experience operating elevators in Marion Junction, Ethan, Corsica, and Armour (all in assorted southeastern counties). He returned to Rochester in 1907 to marry schoolteacher Mary Lucia Moran and brought her to Kimball in 1909. Bradshaw was an active participant in civic affairs in Kimball's development; he served on the city council and school board, served as a trustee of St. Margaret's Catholic Church, belonged to several social organizations, and for a time served the agricultural community by recording official rainfall. In one news article, he was also described as "a mechanical engineer by profession, but buys grain to pass away the time." Bradshaw operated the elevator as an independent proprietor until his death in 1956, and a county history described him as "the oldest active grain dealer in the northwest, having been in the business fifty-eight years. Joe Plachy also worked at the elevator for many years."
Grain elevators became a symbol of agricultural life on the Great Plains, but had antecedents in the movement systems designed by Oliver Evans for gristmill operations dating to the early period of the American Republic. The first use of these systems in elevator form was a wooden, steam-powered "elevating warehouse" built in 1842 by Joseph Dart in Buffalo, New York for the large grain trade coming to the port there through the Great Lakes. Their construction was also supported by the development of the timber industry and the shift in construction techniques away from using heavy, post-and-beam methods to standardized dimension lumber; the modern grain industry (including the elevator), lumber industry, construction industry, engineering profession, rail system, mass marketing, all were intertwined.
The earliest structures used for shipping grain were flathouses, simple rectangular warehouse buildings, that used large amounts of manual labor to move grain in sacks. This was the period in the early nineteenth century when settlement was reaching towards the Missouri River, St. Louis was the major Midwestern shipping center, steamboats of limited size handled transportation, and slaves, free blacks, and Irish immigrants provided much of the labor. In the mid to late-nineteenth century, slavery was abolished and labor costs rose, railroad expansion slowly superseded steamboat travel, and cities like Minneapolis, Omaha, and Chicago grew exponentially. As the grain industry sought greater efficiency and standardization in evaluating, pricing, and moving the perishable commodity, the invention that made this possible was among the most important yet least acknowledged in the history of American agriculture: the steam-powered grain elevator. For instance, in Chicago, the grain industry eventually standardized their system for grading the quality of the grain and pricing it by bushel weight instead of volume, began hiring inspectors in the late 1850s, abstracted grain as a commodity through futures markets, and began regulating the industry through state legislation in the 1870s. In the 1850s, the large terminal elevators in Chicago could receive and ship nearly half a million bushels of grain every ten hours, and, by 1866, Chicago elevators had total capacities from 700,000 to 1,250,000 bushels. In the early days of their construction, the railroad provided many of the first elevators along their lines in order to finance the shift away from the inefficient warehouses and increase the productivity of their terminals. In 1903, South Dakota had nearly 900 elevators with an average capacity of 10,000 to 20,000 bushels. Eventually private companies, granges, cooperatives, and independent owners took on construction and operation of additional elevators along the lines. In 1918, South Dakota ranked sixth in terms Of highest capacities for grain handling with 1,138 country elevators at a total capacity of approximately 57,998,000 bushels. The shift from sacked grain in warehouses to free-flowing grain in elevators was profound, "probably no one foresaw that so simple an act would have such complex consequences... distancing [the marketplace] from the physical universe of fields and crops and rural nature."
Most country elevators had regular configurations and design; they included self-contained Structures or small complexes that incorporated the main house with the elements of the elevator itself, a drive bay, and an office. Country elevators functioned as storage for area farmers, shipping and loading facilities to markets at terminal stations, and small-scale cleaning and drying facilities. The elevator in the main house included the work floor, elevator leg, distribution system of wheel and spouts, headhouse, hopper, and bins. The drive bay or scale house had two doors for the wagons to drive in and out, as well as scales and a winch to tip the grain into the boot below. The operator's office frequently had the power generating system in the basement (steam-powered, then gasoline-powered, then electric) and therefore often was built as a separate building or out of metal or brick in case of fire. In normal operations, small wagons and trucks brought in grain in loads of around 100 to 150 bushels that were dumped into the boot, the grain was weighed and evaluated, the farmer was paid for his grain and left, and then the grain was brought up the leg of the elevator and distributed to the chosen bin. When enough was stored and railcars available, the grain was released from the bin into the hopper for weighing, and then brought up the leg for dispersing into the railroad boxcars or hopper cars in loads of 2000 to 3000 bushels.
From the 1880s, the industry recommended that operators hire professionals to design plans and specifications for the elevator, but there were few progressions in terms of architectural style or functional operations. There were, however, great changes over the years in terms of engineering and design. A great deal of engineering science went into knowing allowable stresses on the construction materials and designing elevators for efficient operation and high capacities. Lumber materials used were primarily old-growth pine or oak and varied in origin as the industry patterns shifted from northern Minnesota and Wisconsin (mid-late nineteenth century), to the South (late-nineteenth to early-twentieth century), and to the Pacific Northwest (made accessible by railroad expansion in the early twentieth century). Concrete was used for elevators at terminal stations from a relatively early date, and as rural wood elevators were fading in the mid-twentieth century, metal-clad or concrete ones replaced them at active stations. The two major methods of wooden elevator construction were studded bins—based on inverted balloon-frame construction with vertical studs being sided on the interior of the bin or cribbed bins. Crib construction was used for the elevators at Buffalo, New York's lake ports as early as 1862, but was the common technique used also for those built along expanding rail lines from 1906 to 1916. The tapered bins used various arrangements of two-by-ten, two-by-eight, two-by-six, and/or two-by-four lumber laid flat to the desired height, overlapping and spiked together at the corners, and were supported by large wooden beams for increased capacity and sided on the exterior with lumber. Using walls made of lumber laid flat and joined only at the corners allowed the walls to be more flexible than studded construction for the bulge and vacuum created when bins were alternately filled and emptied. The use of supporting beams and alternating crib rows across multiple bins added to their strength. Wooden elevators commonly had the disadvantages of being susceptible to infestation, rotting grain between cracks in the wood, and fire from dust combustion or sparks from the railroad. In the 1890s, industry leaders began using more fireproof materials of steel, tin, brick, and reinforced concrete in newly constructed elevators, through many in rural areas continued to be built out of wood for reasons of cost and expertise.
Agribusiness, including rural elevators, additionally had significant roles in local and national political life. Rural elevators were operated by different classes of owners; some worked for private companies with close ties to the railroad companies (line elevators), some for themselves as independent operators, and some as cooperatives. Variations in the ownership of elevators reflected contestation over the grain market economy and the major national political and economic debates between labor and industry. In the 1870s and 80s, there were some attempts by granges to operate elevators, but problems with inexperienced management led many to close in the face of well-organized line elevator companies. Line elevators and, in particular, terminal elevators, almost always had monopoly contracts with the rail company and control over pricing was strong. This control was especially imposing in small towns like Kimball. In the early twentieth century, farmers' cooperatives gradually formed in opposition to railroad monopolies and rectified the shortcomings of the grange elevators. There were only a handful of cooperative-owned elevators in the first years of the twentieth century. By 1910, there were 1,300 co-ops and they owned an estimated 15% of existing elevators, handling about 30% of the marketed grain. The third variety of ownership, independent operators, is frequently left out of the main tension narrative between line elevators and co-ops, in part, because there were fewer of them. In terms of public opinion, generally, independents "were not in ill-repute, except as they allied themselves with the bigger concerns" by forming statewide associations, which tended to work amiably with major shipping terminals and railroad companies—like the Farmers Grain Dealers Association of South Dakota that formed in 1908. Independent operators also re-invested profits back into the community more like co-ops than like the line companies, who sent profits back to their headquarters in major cities. Independents formed an important third option and were entirely dependent on local entrepreneurs.
From the 1930s, many older elevators modernized and owners improved truck dumping mechanisms; installed larger scales and larger and longer moveable loading spouts to facilitate the loading of hopper cars; replaced wooden legs with metal ones; and built new driveways and offices. During World War II, increased capacity and efficiency was encouraged, and the system was still so important that guards were often assigned to patrol elevator rows to deter potential domestic sabotage against any element of the national supply chain. Over the years, many elevators and other agribusinesses along railways expanded their services, with elevators grinding feed, or dealing in other commodities like coal, lumber, and agricultural supplies. In the mid-1950s, many country elevators ceased operations. Overproduction and declining foreign markets had hurt the grain industry, shifts in commercial transportation towards highways shut down smaller railroad stations by allowing trucks to carry product te to larger stations, and urbanization began to deeply affect the population and labor pool of small agricultural towns.
In South Dakota, the golden years for agriculture were the decades from 1900 to 1920, particularly after the period of depression (1886 to 1900) when prices re-stabilized between 1900 and 1914. This agricultural commerce depended heavily on the transportation and shipping system provided by expanded railroad networks. The networks in South Dakota featured hub cities like Sioux Falls, Mitchell, and others as well as numerous rural towns with railroad reserves in which were located depots, lumber yards, supply sheds, warehouses, and elevators. These smaller points were spaced along the rail lines at seven to ten-mile intervals, in part as a measure of the distance that farmers could travel in a day to bring in their product, in another part based on the distance that railroad engines could travel before needing to stop for water, and additionally to provide sidings to allow trains to pass each other. Rail lines determined the flow of the agricultural products, and long-term settlement occurred around access points to that market system. The rail lines, their agents, or subsidiary land companies platted about half of the railroad towns in South Dakota around these regularly-spaced depots and encouraged commercial and residential development.
Many of these small towns were arranged in similar T-town patterns, with a railroad reserve parallel to the tracks, and the main commercial street running perpendicularly to the tracks. The architectural landscape of the railroad businesses was made up of an elevator row, mills, passenger and freight stations, water towers, pump houses, stockyards, lumber yards, freight ramps, carts and wagons bringing goods in and out, and a steady stream of travelers and laborers, both itinerant and resident. Bringing goods to town made up a significant part of the social life of farm families, and such trips fed the local economy as well as providing connection for family members to similar gender and age groups in the community, and to news of broader state, national, and world affairs. This landscape was also dirty and crowded, the process of buying and selling was often disappointing to one party or the other, and labor in it was difficult, painful, and often dangerous. There were many accidents, workers daily ingested dust particles from the grain, coal, and railroad, and regulation for worker's safety was often at the discretion of the employer.
The Bradshaw Elevator played a significant role as the community around Kimball developed during the early twentieth century as one of the railroad agribusinesses that spurred its development. Brule County was created in 1875 and named for the Sicangu ("burned thighs" to the French became Brule) band of the Lakota Sioux, even though the area was a part of the Sioux Reservation until an executive order in 1879 "restored" the land to the public domain and opened it for white settlement—by one account, that strip of land east of the Missouri River was initially included in the reservation in order to maintain a buffer zone between the majority of the reservation west of the river and white settlement in the eastern half of the state. From 1880 to 1884, Brule County's white population jumped from 170 to 6000. Kimball is one of four sizable towns remaining in the county, three of which (Chamberlain, Kimball, and Pukwana) also lay along the Milwaukee Road rail line and later U.S. Highway 16/Interstate-90. Chamberlain additionally sits along the Missouri River, and the small town of Bijou Hills is located to the south along State Highway 50. The rest of the county is overwhelmingly agricultural and range lands. Kimball was one of the many key points where agricultural products from rural areas entered the market, being weighed for transportation to larger shipping hubs like the two Shanard Elevators in Mitchell, and then to processing points in metropolitan cities like Minneapolis-St. Paul or Omaha.
The 1937 Works Progress Administration Guide to South Dakota provided an interesting description of the cookie-cutter small towns established in response to railroad expansion:
Kimball's history as a town began in the spring of 1880 after the Chicago, Milwaukee, & St. Paul Railroad (the Milwaukee Road) established a station there. On June 24, 1881, John D. Lawler, acting as an agent of the Milwaukee Road, filed the plat for Kimball, as he did with Pukwana and Chamberlain. Kimball went through the names of "Siding No. 48" (being its distance west by rail from the city of Mitchell) and "Andover" before residents settled on naming the town after the Milwaukee Road's E.P.D. Kimball, as suggested by his son. In 1881, Kimball got its first school, and businesses established included a grocery, multiple hotels, a hardware store, and a lumber yard. By 1882, a newspaper was established and the Brule County Agricultural Society held its county fair in Kimball. The settlement incorporated as a village in 1883, and got a bank, racetrack, and its first grain elevator, the Hunting Elevator Company. When the available ground water dried up in 1885, residents dug an artesian well to 1,068 feet. The town of Kimball incorporated in 1889. The first electric power plant in Kimball arrived in April 1913 and the town had full service by the Electric Light Company the next year. When the Bradshaw Elevator was constructed, Kimball's population was growing from 453 in 1900 to 713 in 1910, and it peaked at 1111 in 1930.
Railroad businesses were an important area of commercial and social life in Kimball. In 1880, the extension of the Chicago, Milwaukee, & St. Paul Railroad west from Mitchell led the settlement of the towns of Kimball, Pukwana, and Chamberlain in Brule County and many others along the line. Eventually, the Milwaukee Road system extended south through Terre Haute, Indiana and Kansas City, Missouri; north to northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, and west to Seattle, Washington; and the system passed through the major hubs of Chicago, Omaha, and Minneapolis-St. Paul. As one of the depot towns along the line, Kimball's built environment centered around the railroad and the trade it brought. Agribusiness dominated the railroad-associated properties in Kimball and the surrounding area. Historically, the railroad reserve and the first row of businesses along Railroad Street in Kimball, to the south of the tracks themselves, included five elevators, a flour mill, granaries, a creamery, coal sheds, ice houses, corn cribs, and several lumber companies, as well as stock yards to the north of the tracks. The Kimball Freight and Passenger Depot was located between the main track and the siding. The elevators represented each of the three ownership types: a line company, a cooperative, and an independent operator. The Hunting Elevator Company operated a 15,000-bushel capacity, gasoline-powered line elevator in Kimball from before 1893 until sometime before 1928; it was attached to a warehouse, used studded construction for its nine bins, switched from an exterior scale to an attached drive bay sometime between 1904 and 1909, but never converted to electric power. The Brule County Cooperative Elevator Company built their 20,000-bushel, crib-constructed elevator to the east of the Hunting elevator before 1909; it converted to electricity, had five bins in the main house and four additional bins in an annex, and did not have cleaning machinery. The 1908, 20,000-bushel Bradshaw Elevator was owned by O.G. Bradshaw as the only independent operator. Then there was the Kimball Roller Mills that was also built in 1908, but went out of operation sometime between 1917 and 1928; it had had a 15,000-bushel elevator with ten cribbed bins, cleaning machinery and electric power. A 1913 news article indicated that Kimball's three elevators had a combined capacity of 100,000 bushels. Most of Kimball's elevators became obsolete shortly after the transitions and changes of the mid-twentieth century in the face of decreasing trade. The Milwaukee Road finally closed the Kimball Depot in 1975 and it has since been demolished.
