Reflections: How grain made Chicago great and St. Louis less so

This year’s harvest season is largely ended, but truckloads of grain still stream from area farms to grain elevators or directly to Illinois River terminals as the end of the crop goes to market.

This “Golden Stream,” as author William Cronon described it, moves corn and soybeans from field to temporary storage to market in a smooth flow that is a marvel of efficiency, one that would astonish our pioneer farmer ancestors.

In the first half of the 19th century, grain traveled to market in burlap bags and cloth sacks. Before it could be shipped off the farm, corn had to be shelled, and small grains – oats, wheat, rye, and barley – had to be threshed (removed from the stalks) and winnowed to separate the grain from the chaff. Then it was placed in cloth sacks, which were sewn shut, loaded aboard wagons and hauled to the nearest market.

Before railroads pushed west of Chicago to the Fox Valley in the late 1840s, that meant taking horsedrawn wagonloads of full grain sacks over the terrible roads of the era to the South Water Street market. There it was inspected and stored in warehouses until it was sold, either to a local user or to be loaded aboard a ship and sent to the eastern markets.

Farmers nearer to the Illinois River hauled their wagonloads of bulging grain sacks over to the Illinois River, where it could be stored in warehouses until loaded aboard steamboats at Peru – most often the head of navigation on the river – so it could be shipped south to St. Louis, or even all the way to New Orleans. In 1831, a young Abraham Lincoln signed on as a crewman to sail a flatboat owned by New Salem merchant Denton Offutt down the Sangamon River to the Illinois and then on to New Orleans. Among the flatboat’s cargo were “bags of corn.”

At each point on its journey from northern Illinois to grain markets, either south to St. Louis or New Orleans, or east to New York, sacks of grain had to be handled numerous times, making grain shipment an extremely labor-intensive business. Individual sacks had to be moved from farm to wagon to Chicago or St. Louis warehouse to steamboat or flatboat to New Orleans or Buffalo warehouse to sailing ship or Erie Canal boat to the grain’s final destination, where it had to be unloaded yet again.

And then the railroads arrived, along with drastic effects, both positive and negative, on Chicago and St. Louis. St. Louis – the Gateway to the West – knew its prominence depended on its access to the Mississippi River’s steamboat traffic. Hundreds of steamboats delivered their cargoes to the Levee – a broad slope along the riverfront – where slaves hauled sacks and barrels and crates to warehouses and between arriving and departing vessels.

The city’s merchants quickly realized that railroads were antithetical to steamboat shipping on which the city relied. They were so opposed to railroads, in fact, that they forbade bridging the river at their city. As a result, the first bridge across the Mississippi was at Rock Island, which was immediately opposed in court by steamboat interests. Successfully arguing in favor of the bridge in Hurd v. Rock Island Railroad Company was attorney and former river flatboat crewman Abraham Lincoln.

By its opposition to a rail link with the east coupled with geographic problems that didn’t affect Chicago plus rapid advances in grain shipping technology, St. Louis was quickly surpassed as a major grain shipping point.

The main advance in technology that had the biggest impact on grain shipment was the invention of practical grain elevators, which allowed grain to be removed from all those sacks, slashing labor costs. Joseph Dart, a Buffalo, New York, warehouse owner, is credited with inventing the grain elevator in 1842. Essentially, the commercial grain elevator was a collection of vertical grain bins in which grain of various kinds and quality could be separately stored outside of sacks until shipment. The grain was elevated using steam power to the upper bins, where gravity allowed it to flow through chutes aboard anything from canal boats to rail cars.

While the grain elevator was invented in Buffalo, it was really perfected in Chicago. There, huge grain elevators were quickly built along the Chicago River on South Water Street. Grain from Chicago’s hinterland was transported to the elevators by wagon, rail, and canal boat, where it was graded by quality and then loaded into the elevated bins, all by machinery instead of on the backs of stevedores.

Which is where geography comes in. Because the Chicago River and Lake Michigan are both pretty much immune to floods, those huge grain elevators could be built right on the riverbank. The Mississippi floods on a regular basis, meaning elevators at St. Louis could not be built along the river or they’d be flooded one or more times every year. Geography, coupled with the city’s disdain for railroads, meant St. Louis was quickly supplanted as a major grain transshipment point. Cut off from rail lines heading east, the rest of its economy was harmed, too.

Meanwhile, Chicago’s economy, based on roads, canals, railroads and lake shipping exploded, making it the premier city in the nation’s Middle West. Thanks to its extensive transportation web, Chicago’s hinterland underwent a massive expansion that, in economic terms at least, eventually took in entire states including Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa. The grain, timber, livestock, iron ore and other commodities that flowed in a seemingly never-ending and always growing stream into the city by the lake led to at least one historian to dub it, without exaggeration, “Nature’s Metropolis.”

So, a week into meteorological winter and a couple weeks before astronomical winter, as farmers begin wrapping up another season, another year’s crops are well on the way to markets near and far. It’s the end of another year’s cycle that’s been going on here in the Fox Valley for more than 180 years thanks both to accidents of geography and the genius of people who were interested in making a buck and who ended up changing the world.

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