"The original Eastern Elevator was a wooden grain elevator with two marine legs built in 1895 on this location at the tip of Kelly's Island. Sold by its owners to the American Linseed Oil Company in June 1900, the elevator was fully loaded with over $400,000 worth of grain when it suffered a grain dust explosion and fire on the night of July 23rd, 1900. The fire consumed the entire structure and its contents, costing its new owners and their insurers some $750,000, which quickly folded their enterprise.

"After the site of the former elevator was cleared of debris, the highly valuable land was quickly purchased by the Great Eastern Elevator Company, who contracted the architecture firm of Harry R. Wait to design a pioneering steel-binned grain elevator. Constructed by the Steel Storage and Elevator Construction Company and the Indiana Bridge Company, the Great Eastern Elevator was completed in 1901 and featured 68 separate steel tanks which could store 2.5 million bushels of grain. The elevator was supplied primarily by lake freighters, and had two marine legs to offload vessels alongside the elevators Buffalo River dock.

"Great Eastern operated their elevator successfully for thirty years before the Great Depression put the company in dire financial straits, allowing its purchase by the multi-national grain conglomerate Cargill in 1936. Cargill elected to retain the Great Eastern name on their new facility, and operated it through the Second World War before they idled the facility in 1947. With the Great Eastern elevator in need of major upkeep and repairs, Cargill chose to focus their operations at their Superior and Pool elevators in Buffalo rather than the Great Eastern, and in the winter of 1948 the Great Eastern was demolished.

"Today the former site of the Great Eastern Elevator is part of the General Mills facility, and is used for packaging and loading of tractor trailers."

See also:

• Historic Photos - Industrial Heritage Trail Signage

"The Electric Elevator (demolished in 1984) stood adjacent to the Buffalo River and consisted of steel bins resting on concrete foundations with a tall, corrugated iron workhouse at the wharf end and a steel-frame horizontal transfer system for the distribution of grain above the bins. The bins, which had hemispherical bottoms to facilitate the flow of grain, rested above basement conveyor belts that carried grain to and fro below grade.

"The most striking feature of the Electric Elevator's appearance to the eyes of people familiar with its wooden ancestors would have been its cylindrical bins standing completely exposed to view. For unlike earlier timber grain elevators, the Electric had no structure sheltering its bins from the elements. Exposed bins and machinery would become common practice for many later elevator builders. And the bin design itself departed from the rectangular shape of previous timber crib bins. Cylindrical bins, it was thought, were stronger than rectangular ones and were less likely to suffer damage when grain was emptied quickly from them.

"Both of these aspects of the Electric's design–exposed bins and cylindrical silos - had their limitations in the minds of elevator engineers, but their use here definitely marked a new stage in elevator design and construction. "An experimental and transitional building of unusual form," Reyner Banham, the architectural historian who was the first to study Buffalo's grain elevators, declared of the bygone Electric.
 

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See also:

See also:

• Historic Photos - Industrial Heritage Trail Signage
• Spencer Kellogg Family History
• Spencer Kellogg Elevator / Schaefer Brewing / St. Mary's Cement Elevator
• HABS
  

"Dunbar's Reed Elevator which was described as "the most complete elevator in all its appointments in Buffalo" when it went into operation in 1862, was probably the first to have employed corrugated iron to protect its marine tower; the rest of the exterior and the roof wore a shield of slate." - Francis R. Kowsky, A History of Buffalo's Grain Elevators

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See also: Historic Photos - Industrial Heritage Trail Signage