In Pictures: On the hunt for Manitoba’s ‘prairie sentinels’

Melanie and I were on a quest. While on assignment in Manitoba, photographer and reporter set out to document the old-style wooden grain elevators that tower over this prairie landscape. It took Melanie poring over a map to pick them out. But at one time, farmers say, visitors could drive down the highway and see rows of them in their rearview mirror. 

The storage facilities, where grain would be loaded onto the national railway, have a connection with the world wars that ravaged the European grain market in the early 20th century. Production shifted to the Canadian prairies, attracting immigrants – many of them Ukrainians – who settled in towns next to the tracks, each community centered around its grain elevator that would stand as a beacon from afar. 

The number of elevators increased from less than 100 in 1892 to 5,500 at their peak in the 1940s, according to the Inglis Grain Elevators National Historic Site. 

Currently, only about 80 remain – with the majority having burned down or fallen into such disrepair they needed to be demolished. They’ve been replaced with modern facilities that point to the more industrial nature of agriculture today. 

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

An old train car sits on the tracks at the Inglis Grain Elevators National Historic Site in Inglis, Manitoba. This site preserves one of the last rows of standard-plan wooden grain elevators. The earliest examples date to the 1880s.

In Inglis, a row of five wooden elevators has been preserved at the end of an abandoned rail line. A plaque at the site describes them poetically as “prairie sentinels” that act as “the silent guardians of Western Canadian agricultural history.” 

But for us the real joy came from the elevators we stumbled upon – sighting an abandoned structure, tilting, with its paint chipped and letters missing from the name of the town it once served. 

Some people might see the dilapidated elevators – with their shattered windows and rotting wood – as a blight on the landscape. Instead, we marveled at what they represent: the passing of 100 years, testimony to a slower, and some would argue simpler, way of life.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

A corroded nail stands out against the weathered wood of a grain elevator in Oakburn, Manitoba.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

Once, thousands of elevators like this one in Oakburn were used across Manitoba to store grain. The grain was then loaded onto rail cars for transport. Now, only about 80 such structures remain, relics of an era of less-industrialized agriculture.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff

The “L” is missing from the town of Beulah’s old grain elevator.