So let’s say you’re an early 19th-century Kendall County farmer and you’ve wrapped up the harvest of your small grains – oats, wheat, barley, and rye – and you’re ready to get started on the corn harvest.
Those small grains are pretty labor-intensive things to grow. Ground has to be carefully prepared, the grain sown and then carefully tended until it’s ripe and the harvest begins in late summer. The harvest itself is very labor-intensive, as well, but when all’s said and done, you’ve got several hundred bushels of threshed wheat in your grain bins ready for market.
How do you get it there?
If we’re talking the days before the railroad was pushed west of Chicago in the late 1840s and into Kendall County in the early 1850s, that meant hauling your crop to Chicago. But it couldn’t be hauled as loose grain in the loosely built wooden wagons of the era. Instead, it had to be loaded into grain sacks for handling on its way to market.
Grain sacks apparently were made from coarse hemp or linen fabric. Hemp, especially, was favored because it was easy to grow and could be woven into a sturdy fabric. It’s likely some of this hemp and linen sacking was made right here in the Fox Valley. But although I’ve spent quite a bit of time looking for a description of the typical grain sack of the 19th century of the kind used by those hardy pioneer farmers, I’ve been unsuccessful in finding out what the material was like as well as where those sacks came from.
Indeed, American University Professor Mary Eschelbach Hansen, writing in the 2000 edition of Essays in Economic and Business History (“Middlemen in the Market for Grain: Changes and Comparisons”) searched for but was unable to find any specific references to who made grain sacks or what they were made of. As one of her colleagues noted, the sacks wouldn’t have been all that cheap and would have added a fair amount to the cost of the grain itself. But they seem to have been one of those things so common no one ever thought to describe them.
And a lot of sacks were used as Chicago gradually surpassed St. Louis as the Midwest’s grain hub. According to early Kendall County historian E.W. Hicks, writing about events in 1848: “In Little Rock, as many as two hundred and seventy teams have passed on one road in one day, most of them going to or returning from Chicago with produce.”
The whole system of using sacks to ship grain proved too cumbersome, especially as the combination of mechanization, and the introduction of new grain varieties and better farming techniques resulted in ever-higher yields. Each one of those hundreds of thousands of sacks of grain had to be handled numerous times as the grain went from farm to its ultimate destination, often all the way to the Atlantic coast.
In 1842, Buffalo, New York, warehouse owner Joseph Dart developed the concept of storing grain emptied from sacks and elevated into vertical bins where gravity could be used to easily load it aboard grain barges for shipment east on the Erie Canal.
Dart’s idea for a steam-powered elevator was quickly adopted by grain merchants in Chicago, who then proceeded to greatly improve and enlarge it. The savings in time and labor was huge. Chicago’s quick adoption of the grain elevator concept, combined with its similarly fast adoption of railroads and the completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, along with the city’s fortunate location at the foot of Lake Michigan soon turned it into the nation’s grain hub.
Previously, St. Louis held that title, but Mother Nature penalized the Gateway City with the undependable flow of the Mississippi River. The Big Muddy’s levels could fluctuate by as much as 40 feet, and that prevented the new grain elevators from being built close to the riverbank. That meant all those sacks of grain had to be unloaded, one at a time, by whole armies of stevedores, stacked on the levee until purchased by a grain merchant and then moved once again to a warehouse until it was time to once again load the sacks aboard a barge or steamboat for shipment.
The city also was opposed to railroads because the steamboat interests, then paramount in St. Louis, were convinced they would spell the death of riverboat traffic. As a result, grain from St. Louis could basically go easily in only one direction – downstream by barge and steamboat – unlike at Chicago, where grain could be shipped north, south, east, and even west by rail, canal and lake freighter.
Although those steamboat interests bitterly fought it, construction of the first bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis began in 1867, with James Eads handling the job. It opened seven years later and, in a tribute to Eads’ skill, is still standing.
But by then, it was too late for St. Louis to regain its former “Gateway to the West” glory that had been seized by Chicago and its rails, canals and lake shipping.
These days, the few farmers who grow small grains in the Fox Valley plant and harvest with huge mechanized equipment, and then haul the already threshed and cleaned grain directly to the grain terminals on the Illinois River. In a huge departure from those days so long ago, the grain is never touched by human hands from the time it has ripened in the field to when it pours from a grain hauling truck at the grain terminal.
Not only has grain shipment undergone a revolution, but so has production. In the 1830s, it took about 370 work hours to produce 100 bushels of wheat. These days, it takes fewer than three hours, which is why the steadily declining number of U.S. farmers continue to produce enough to feed so many other people.
But it all started back there nearly 200 years ago when those pioneering farmers began hauling all those sacks of grain to Chicago in the hopes, just like today’s farmers, of getting a fair price for their crop.
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