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Show CHICAGO GRAIN ELEVATORS. Their aggregate capacity is 16,840,000 bushels; individual capacity from 90,000 to 2,000,000 bushels. They are in different parts of the city, but those at the disposal of the Chicago Burlington and Quincy give nearly one third of the whole capacity. One of the newest of them, Armour Dole and Co's elevator "D," may be taken as what is the fashion to call "Representative" elevator. It certainly is a very fine one, and should be seen by all inquiring visitors. It was begun in 1875, is 386 feet long, 100 feet wide, and 145 feet high, requiring five million feet of lumber in its construction, and costs $350,000. One can easily obtain permission to inspect it, and the superintendent will enlighten his ignorance, or increase and qualify his knowledge, as the case may be. He is conducted to a little "elevator" (here is the confusion of names again; it is what our English friends call a "lift"), and hoisted to the top floor. At one end he sees, swiftly passing over a shaft, the largest belt in the United States, 280 feet in length, and eighty inches in width. Below are great scales and bins sixty feet deep. A fine and suggestive dust gradually covers his clothes as he listens to the polite cicerone, who is telling him that there are twenty-six standard Fairbanks scales in the building, and that they weigh so accurately that in an aggregate of six car loads there was only a shortage of thirty pounds between "St. (Saint) Joe" and "Chicago. But "look out for the engine when the bell rings." A train has come in below full of grain in bulk. Into a car goes a great shute or nozzle, somebody pulls a lever, and, presto away has gone the grain up into the weighing bin, then down into a receptacle of profundity and security. It dawns on the observer's mind that one man's property is by no means kept separate from another man's. This grain is all graded by a State inspector; it is "weighed in" and "weighed out," and all that is needful is that the contents of each bin should be homogeneous. But here comes another train - empty cars to be filled for the East. Men wanted with shovels to laboriously handle the grain? Not at all. Down comes that shute again, boards are put across the doorways of the cars, and in one of them after another the grain runs up foot by foot. In less time than any one would think possible - a few minutes to each car - the train is entirely loaded, its doors are closed, and the engine is drawing it out again to be delivered to one of the Eastern trunk lines. - A. A. Hayes, Jr. (Junior), in Harper's Magazine. |
