Prairie Sentinels – Plenty Saskatchewan

An article by Chris & Connie.

There is an old wood-cribbed grain elevator in Plenty Saskatchewan, which we’ll be looking at here. These once common buildings, which could be seen all over the prairies, are pretty few and far between today, most of them having been torn down in the last couple decades. This one is even more unique as it’s still being used to process grain for loading into rail cars.

The building can be found right in town. It’s sits alongside a sleepy railway branch line and is in fact the furthest customer at the extreme east end of this stretch of track. There has been an elevator on this exact spot since the 1910s. The current building is from the early 1960s – some reports say it was rebuilt from that old elevator, but research suggests it was an entirely new replacement building constructed on the same plot of land.

↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ Scroll down for photos and to comment ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓

The elevator complex has two steel bin annexes on the west end, recent additions from the last twenty years or so. The two wood annexes on the east side are much older (exact date unknown). An annex, by the way, was a cheap, easy and very common way to increase a facility’s capacity. Note one of the wooden ones has remnants of some old faded lettering on its sides.

The previous owner of the building was the Saskatchewan Wheat Pool. This firm was founded in the 1920s but has roots that go back a decade or so before that – a predecessors firm was the Saskatchewan Cooperative Elevator Company, who in fact built that older elevator we spoke of earlier. The Pool was for most of its history Canada’s largest grain handling firm and they had hundred and hundreds of elevators across the province. Always a farmer owned cooperative, they merged with a rival less than a decade ago and are no more.

In the early 2000s, the Pool sold the elevator to a small farmer owned operator, Prairie West Terminal. That group was absorbed recently by the Canadian Wheat Board, once an arm of the government but now privatized. The CWB itself was recently acquired by an investment group, G3 Canada. Prairie West had several elevators outside the one in Plenty, all in the same general area, and now CWB/G3 facilities. Most were wooden elevators, but one was a huge inland terminal made of concrete, located not far away and is seen and discussed briefly in this report.

The Plenty elevator is listed as handling Barley only which makes it a sort of niche market facility. There is room, according to the company, for twenty or so railcars to be loaded.

There used to be three other grain elevators in Plenty, all built in the 1910s and closed by the 1980s. Grain companies from the past once represented here include United Grain Growers, Federal Grain and Searle Grain. Via mergers and acquisitions, a common occurrence in the industry, the Pool by the 1970s ended up owning all these others. A firm having more than one facility in any one town was not all that odd.

A traditional wooden elevator still being used today is pretty rare. There used to be several thousands of them in the province back in the day, built from the early 1900s well into the 1980s. Every town had one or more. Today there a four hundred or so left. Most are in private hands (many sitting alongside former rail lines) and are often used for grain storage by farmers or farm groups, a few are museums, some are simply abandoned.

The concrete elevator outside town, which we visited only briefly, account a time crunch, dates from the 1990s. It originally belonged to partners PWT and Agricore (merged Alberta and Manitoba Pools), later Agricore United (with the additions of United Grain Growers). PWT took it over completely in the early 2000s. Recall, it’s a CWB/G3 property now. The grain industry is always in flux, if that’s not obvious already.

This loading point is referred to by the railway as “Prairie West” or simply as “the Concrete”. Able to fill a complete train’s worth of grain cars in one pass, these sort of high-throughput loading terminals are now the norm. The transition from small town wood elevator, starting in the 1990s, to these behemoths, was brutal and swift (a true paradigm shift to use that overused phrase). Thousands of the old ones were torn down in the span of a few years.

The track serving both elevators belongs to the CPR and is their Kerrobert Subdivision built in the early 1910s. This stretch of track runs from its namesake town in the west, where it connected with other lines, all the way to Plenty. There are rails still in place beyond but they’re not used and are likely to be pulled up soon. Trains runs on an as-needed basis, depending on grain markets. Lucky us, we happened to catch one. This line is one of the few traditional grain branches still in operation and one of a tiny handful not run by short line company (who are generally seen as more efficient operators).

Prairie West has a small fleet of railcars, some of which were seen at the wooden elevator. These are old Government grain hoppers built in the 1970s. Battered, rusty and still wearing old logos, they are nearing the end of their service lives.

Plenty Saskatchewan was founded around the time the railway arrived. Grain farming held great promise and the place was heralded as the “Land of Plenty”. Today, some hundred and twenty or so people live in town.

More Saskatchewan grain elevators…
Whitepool.
Coleville Saskatchewan Pool “A”.
Marengo’s crazy Frankenvator.
Prairie Sentinels – Cadillac Saskatchewan.

If you wish more information on what you’ve seen here, by all means contact us!

Date: June, 2015.
Location: Plenty, SK.
Article references: Prairie West Terminal, Canadian Pacific Railway records, Book: Land of Plenty.
The elevators are not publicly accessible but can be viewed from nearby roads.

  • _________________________

    BIGDoer.com: Doing it Different!



    Something to say in private? Click here to: Reach Us!
    NEWS!First TimersFAQMeet the Team
    BIGDoer.com on Facebook

    If you liked this post, please tip your server…



    Or

    © 2012-2024 Chris Doering, Johanna (Connie) Biggart & the BIGDoer.com Society. 🍁🎀

Plenty grain elevator

The old grain elevator at Plenty Saskatchewan.

Plenty SK grain elevator

Under threatening skies…

PWT grain car

Railcars belonging to the firm that runs the elevator.

Plenty Saskatchewan grain elevator

This old building has roots dating back almost a hundred years.

Plenty SK elevator

This facility is used for barley loading only.

Plenty Saskatchewan elevator

The track is a branch belonging to the CPR.

Plenty Saskatchewan

Plenty is a small town with a population of just over a hundred.

Prairie West Plenty Saskatchewan

The building was quiet the day of our visit.

Prairie West Terminal Plenty SK

PWT = Prairie West Terminal.

Prairie West Concrete

A nearby concrete grain facility being serviced by the railway.

14 responses

  1. jewels says:

    I’m sad I can’t see all the articles and photos.

    • Sorry, we’ve had to limit the amount of traffic due to costs. We may be able to open it up for more people later in September, but we’re not completely sure.

  2. Carrie Taylor says:

    Having lived right across the street from the elevators in Plenty its great to see that one is still standing. My dad was also a grain buyer for the Pool but at a siding called Downe it was outside of Plent. Thanks for the memories.

  3. Kevin Smith says:

    Having lived in Plenty through the sixties seventies and eighties I believe the elevator was build attest in the pre 1960s. Originally there were 2 annexes running North south on the north side of the elevator. These were torn down in the late sixties or early seventies as a kid they already looked ancient and opeartionally were as they could only be emptied with an auger and scaled back into elevator. At this time an annex or both was added to the elevator along with the new office. Sometime in the early 1980 the steel bins and the truck loading spout was added along with a new high capacity leg and seed cleaning plant to allow loading and unloading to operate simultaneously.

    • Thanks for commenting. The current owners and old documents all point to it being built in the early 1960s. Then again, records are sometimes wrong. I’ve seen it a gazillion times. Now we know about the annexes, which was a great help.

      • Kevin Smith says:

        I stand corrected I was in Plenty for a high school reunion and ran into the elevator agent from the early 1970s through to the early nineties. Indeed the elevator itself was from the early 1960s the old wooded annexes predated the elevator itself.

        • Perhaps they once belonged to the first elevator here and were reused? Seems plausible.

        • Graham Jacklin says:

          Hi. Nice pictures. My dad was the agent in Hood (about 4 miles west of Plenty) until about 1961, when the Pool agent in Plenty, (Earl Taylor) passed away and then dad moved into Plenty to be the agent until the early 70’s and then moved to Swift Current…….

  4. Connie Biggart says:

    Great time shooting elevators!

  5. Kelli Travis says:

    Really nice elevators! Happy that some old wood elevators are still in use.

You cannot copy content of this page

Please log-in to continue...
This allows unrestricted access to every post @BIGDoer.com, popups are eliminated,
commenting is on and the "contact us" page is enabled.

Esc to close this box.

Lost Password?

Or...

Your social site may send you a routine notice of login.

Or signup, here: Subscriber Register
___
BIGDoer.com: Serving up POP HISTORY & other McFun!…(Mmmm, yummy bite-sized pieces.)
One million plus words & tens of thousands of photos!