They once towered above Riverton, Hudson, Arapahoe, and Lander, but only the Lander Mill remains from the era of grain elevators alongside the tracks of the Chicago North Western.
A pair of 1926 wheat farmers near Lander, Mr. Nalis and Mr. Hadamans, planted, irrigated, harvested, and loaded their wheat harvest by hand with scoop shovels from horse-drawn wagons to Chicago North West boxcars at the siding in Lander.
They shipped their summer’s labor to Omaha. As was the practice in the day, a broker handled the transportation and sale of the grain upon its arrival in eastern Nebraska. The two men split a check for $1.12 after the freight was deducted.
It was a common problem in Fremont County before farmers organized into cooperatives and built silos to hold grain when market prices dropped.
It remained a problem with potato production until markets boomed in World War II. In a similar story, the late Erhard Schamber, who farmed west of the highway between Kinnear and Pavillion, kept an invoice framed on his living room wall to remind him of the bad old days.
Schamber loaded 80 acres of potatoes into trucks, hauled them to the railroad in Riverton, and shipped them to a buyer in Illinois. Six weeks later, he received his payment, only it wasn’t a payment; he had a bill from the buyer for $11.32. He had to pay for over 300 tons of potatoes he grew on his 80-acre operation that summer.
Early 20th-century farming was a challenge. They faced the same conditions that modern farmers do: drought, floods, frost, and rollercoaster markets. They worked with banks, irrigation companies, the wind, and more hail than we have at present. One issue modern farmers don’t have to deal with is transporting their crops and livestock. That’s an established line item in every agricultural operation. It might fluctuate due to unstable fuel prices, but it is a fixed, expected expense.
The rollercoaster economy is nothing new in Wyoming, and most of the Northern Great Plains. Near St. Cloud, Minnesota, in the summer of 1938, 15-year-old Sigmund “Pete” Hahn found a job, something difficult to find in the late Depression Era. His uncle hired him to unload a couple of box cars filled with flaxseed.
Flaxseed is small, slick, and acts like quicksand, quickly engulfing someone who unwarily steps into a container of it. Hahn stood on a sheet of plywood “floating” on top of the flaxseed inside the boxcars. She shoveled the flaxseed down a chute that lowered with the dropping of the cargo.
In the decades preceding his job, several dozen young men had drowned in flaxseed.
Modern elevators took care of this hazard with powered augers, belly dump box cars, and dump pits that tilted trucks, spilling the grain out of the back.
Early elevators were dangerous, prone to exploding in huge blasts when volatile grain dust found a spark. Sparks were common with largely uninsulated bare copper wire stretching between insulators in the open.
Riverton lost two bean elevators to fire, one in 1930 and the other in 1989.
Irrigation was a hurdle facing early farmers around Riverton, Pavillion, Ethete, and Lander; the second was storage, with transportation a close third.
There was no need for grain elevators before the Chicago North Western Railway arrived in 1906.
The Lander Mill was in full production in 1888, grinding locally grown wheat into flour. At first, the mill was powered by water from a wooden flume connected to a low dam on the Popo Agie River. It worked well in warm weather but froze in the winter. Later, it was converted to steam.
Previously, flour had to be hauled overland from either Rawlins or Green River by freight wagon and carried a heavy tariff.
The oil-fired boiler building the steam was connected to a generator later and provided electricity to Lander at night when the mill wasn’t grinding flour. The mill operated Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday each week, with the other two weekdays set aside for “ironing” day. Electric clothes irons were the first popular home appliance.
The grain harvest was vastly different than the high-speed combines and large box trucks of today.
They called it “Field Harvesting,” but it wasn’t completed in the field.
The first step was a horse or mule-drawn grain binder that cut the stalks and tied them into sheaves. Though it seems incredibly labor-intensive today, it was a big step above cutting the wheat by hand and then wrapping it individually into sheaves.
The bundles or sheaves were gathered and stacked vertically in cone-shaped groups called shooks. This allowed the grain to dry.
The shooks were loaded onto wagons and taken to the farm yard, where they were stacked in barns or in large hayricks.
Once they were dried, mobile threshing machines were set on each farm in succession and the grain was separated from the stalks. At first, Fremont County farmers used threshers driven by horses, but later steam engines took over.
The threshing crew was a roving band of workers who took the stalked grain, tossed it into the thresher, separating the chaff from the grain and delivering a finished product of clean, dry wheat, barley, or oats.
The threshing crew charged a hefty price for their work, and the only hope a farmer had was to get a good price at some distant market in eastern Nebraska or Illinois. That rarely happened.
Grain farming was a risky, labor-intensive enterprise that depended on the fickle weather, even more unstable markets, and railroads that carefully priced their shipping rates to milk every last penny out of farmers, short of bankrupting them each season. Something had to change.
The change came in local cooperatives and in elevators that eased at least some of the brutal labor required to bring in and sell a crop.
In Riverton, the first elevator began to take shape in the summer of 1919.
The Oakdale Milling Company of Oakdale, Nebraska, began construction that summer.
The Riverton Review of August 20, 1919, almost breathlessly describes the solution to the farmers’ woes in glowing terms.
The building would rise 82 feet above the ground, above a 22-foot-deep pit, creating a storage facility 104 feet tall. The capacity was listed at 50,000 bushels, an ample facility for the growing county.
The Oakdale Milling Company was interested in wheat to supply their flour mill back in Nebraska. Soon, Fremont County wheat would be ground into flour and sold across the Midwest in Nebraska, South Dakota, and Iowa.
The Riverton Review of July 14, 1920, told the story of local investors pouring $25,000 into the project with the hope of creating a stable method of selling and transporting wheat.
The elevator was a success, so successful that in 1921, a second elevator, one that not only purchased and held wheat, but other grains as well, opened in downtown Riverton, just a few blocks from the Chicago North Western Depot on Main Street.
The Riverton Hide, Wool and Fur Company, owned by Ed Wimpenny and his son Clarence, decided to expand into the elevator business.
The Riverton Review of March 9, 1919, described the transformation.
The grain business of the area has grown to such enormous proportions that it has gotten beyond the point of economy in handling without the aid of machinery.
The elevator will have a storage capacity of 14,000 bushels, and while this is greater than needed for the company’s personal business, they decided it would be economical to build a structure large enough to meet the demands of many of their patrons and also be prepared for the certain future.
To say that the elevator will be complete and modern in every detail would be sufficient description for those accustomed to up-to-date plants, but for the benefit of those who are less informed we give the following details: The structure will stand about sixty-five feet above ground, with a pit sixteen feet deep. It will be equipped with eight large bins; two electric motors to run the lifts and other machinery; a Eureka cleaning machine with a capacity of 1,000 bushels per hour, which is equal to one carload; a 100-bushel hopper scale; one ten-ton wagon dump scale; a Number 3 Bowser grinder with a grinding capacity of 1,800 bushels per hour; spout gravity system for loading freight cars, and facilities whereby a freight car may be unloaded by gravity.
It was a marvel of engineering for early 20th-century Fremont County.
The Jones-Hetteisaer Construction Company of Kansas City, Missouri, won the contract to build the facility and completed it by harvest time in 1921.
Riverton Review – March 9, 1921
Local Firm Will Erect Elevator
Riverton Hide, Wool & Fur Co. Calls for Better Facilities
Another grain elevator will soon be under construction in Riverton, according to E. Wimpenny and his son, Clarence Wimpenny, of the Riverton Hide, Wool & Fur Company, who are engineering the undertaking. The structure will be erected at the north end of the present warehouse along the C. & N.W. tracks, part of which will be removed to make sufficient room.
The company’s grain business has grown to such enormous proportions that it has gone beyond the point of economy in handling without mechanical aid.
The new elevator will have a storage capacity of 14,000 bushels. While this is greater than needed for the company’s own business, they decided it would be economical to build a structure large enough to meet the needs of their patrons and to prepare for certain future growth.
To say that the elevator will be complete and modern in every detail would be sufficient description for those familiar with up-to-date plants. But for the benefit of others, here are the details:
The structure will stand about sixty-five feet above ground, with a pit sixteen feet deep. It will be equipped with eight large bins, two electric motors to run the lifts and other machinery, a Eureka cleaning machine with a capacity of 1,000 bushels per hour (equal to one carload), a 100-bushel hopper scale, a ten-ton wagon dump scale, and a No. 3 Bowser grinder with a grinding capacity of 1,800 bushels per hour. It will also feature a spout gravity system for loading freight cars, and facilities to unload cars by gravity.
The plant’s arrangement will allow a grower to bring wheat directly to the elevator, drive onto the dump scales, unload instantly, be reweighed, and receive the cleaned grain’s byproducts almost immediately. The cleanings will be weighed and returned, ensuring the farmer is paid for the actual amount of good wheat in each load.
Without these cleaning facilities, many elevators must deduct a percentage for dockage, which the grower loses and does not recover. The elevator itself also loses, since it must pay freight on this dockage to market points where further deductions are taken.
The Wimpenny Elevator eliminated much of the back-breaking work of selling grain. Advances in tractors and combines did the rest. A farmer could now produce wheat, barley, rye, or oats without the paid help of dozens of workers.
Modern agriculture was rising on the plains and valleys of Fremont County.
The Riverton Elevator, as it became known, was a cooperative, with members from local farms joining to process, store, and ship grain. Wimpenny’s was a business, a business that began in Casper and moved to Riverton.
Edwin Wimpenny was an adventurer. Born in England in 1848, he set out in search of gold in South Africa, Australia, and eventually found his way to Wyoming. At age 26, he opened a business in central Wyoming, Casper Hides, Wool, Furs, and Feed.
Business was good, and a few years later, he started a more lucrative venture with Harry Ballard, opening a stage and freight line west to the station at Arapaho and then on to Fort Brown.
Wimpenny convinced a childhood friend, Swire Rhodes, an accomplished taxidermist, to immigrate to Lander and establish a tannery.
Wimpenny’s son, Clarence, suffered from tuberculosis. In an era before antibiotics, the prevalent treatment for the disease was to move to a dry climate with plenty of fresh air. Clarence, his wife Eula, and infant son Andrew took the train to Casper in 1912.
By 1915, with improved health, Clarence and his father decided to expand the business to Riverton, opening the Riverton Hide, Wool, and Fur Company.
The father and son team watched as agriculture grew with each new lateral in the tumultuous expansion of irrigation surrounding Riverton
In 1919, they decided to build a grain elevator, and the Riverton Hide Wool and Fur Company Elevator (a mouthful for a name) sprang up along the Chicago North Western tracks. While it remained the legal name of the building, it was soon known as the Wimpenny Elevator.
They continued to buy and sell hides, wool, and fur, but agriculture became their main source of revenue. Trucks began to replace horse-drawn wagons, but the method of transporting grain didn’t matter; the grain had to be shoveled by hand out of the beds of incoming trucks and wagons. It wasn’t until years later that a hydraulic lift was installed that the beds could be tilted and emptied into the underground hopper. From there it was augured to the upper levels of the elevator.
Wimpenny sold nursery plants in the spring, baby chicks, animal feed, chemicals, cleaned grain, and installed a chipper that removed husks from beans. They could bag oats, barley, or corn into 100-pound burlap bags for local purchase.
It was a thriving enterprise.
Riverton paid for city expenses through saloon taxes until that revenue source dried up on January 17, 1920, when the Volstead Act took effect and began prohibition. It was a double whammy for Fremont County, where many farmers had barley contracts with eastern breweries and distilleries.
Cities across America began imposing “Occupation Taxes” to compensate for the loss of alcohol revenue.
In Riverton, the city council set rates for every business from physicians’ offices to grocery stores. The two highest charges, $25 annually, went to banks and to the three elevators operating within the city limits. Business was good.
In March 1940, Paul and Burnys Hughes purchased the Wimpenny Elevator. Paul heard of the opportunity to buy the business from then 52-year-old Clarence Wimpenny.
Paul traveled to Riverton via the “Galloping Goose,” an engine with a single passenger car that ran from Casper to Lander with stops in Moneta, Shoshoni, Hudson, and Riverton.
He paid $1000 down and returned to Kansas to bring his family west to Fremont County. The agreement required payment of the amount in full by March 15, 1940, or forfeiture of the down payment.
Paul loaded Burnys and the children, Joseph and Eleanor, into the car and headed into Nebraska for the run to Riverton.
They left their home in Leavenworth on March 12th and ran into a late-spring storm in Nebraska, with heavy rain and driving sleet. They reached Riverton at 5 am on March 15. Paul made only one stop on the three-day trek and credited staying awake with the banter of his 10-year-old daughter, Eleanor.
Paul was a World War I-era soldier and an active member of the American Legion all his life.
The Hughes Elevator, Riverton Exchange, and the CO-OP Elevator on Federal Boulevard were all vital institutions to Riverton and Pavillion grain farmers.
Originally, the primary crop was wheat, but that changed during the 1930s to oats and barley, with potatoes, sugar beets, and corn increasing in acreage.
In the post-World War II period, roads improved, surplus Army trucks found their way to thousands of farms nationwide, and the need for elevators diminished.
Direct loading of semi-trucks from the combine in the field, then non-stop to a buyer somewhere in Nebraska, Colorado, or the Dakotas, lowered the demand for rail transportation.
The Chicago North Western Railroad gradually diminished services to Fremont County, cutting passenger service in 1943, then closing the depots at Shoshoni, Arapahoe, Hudson, Moneta, and eventually ending all trains to Lander.
By the early 1980s, the tracks were in such disrepair that a trip of 21 miles from Riverton to Shoshoni took over three hours on the rickety, uneven rails.
When the railroad era ended, it spelled the end of elevators as well. The Hughes Elevator was demolished in the 1980s, making way for a small business park on its original location. Farmer’s Exchange, later known as the McMillan Elevator, was disassembled for lumber and sheet metal in the early 2000s.
That left just the CO-OP, now called the Cenex, as an elevator, but they no longer buy and ship grain. There is no market on the non-existent track bed that lies under the Rails to Trails Bike Path east of the Cenex complex.
In their day, elevators meant progress, economic opportunity, and a way to stabilize prices that allowed farmers to stay in business.
Modern technology has taken over with direct trucking from field to factory, real-time contracting via online brokerage firms, and GPS farming.
Corn, beans, potatoes, barley, and oats, along with sugar beets and soybeans, are still grown in Fremont County. The biggest crop remains alfalfa, while wheat production has diminished to just a trickle of what it once was.
Progress, as it once was, reached for the sky high above the city.