In their prime, they were the harbingers of good times.
Last Sunday afternoon, I walked the couple of blocks from our house toward the centre of town. At the tracks of what was once the bustling Toronto & Nipissing Railway line, I stopped and looked up. There, rising like sentinels to a long lost era, stand the silos of the once prosperous Co-Op facility. Those now abandoned concrete, steel and wooden granaries are nearly 80 years old right now. But for George Moore, long-time Uxbridge, Ont., resident, they symbolized a very different time.
“Things were booming pretty good here at that time,” he said to me this week. “Those silos were an important part of that boom.”
George Moore ought to know. He’s lived in this community for 92 years. And during those boom years, when farmers came from far and wide to the Uxbridge Co-Op for seed, he was the president of its board. You see, unlike grain elevators of western Canada, which were built to receive and store farmers’ seed crops, the granary facilities in our town dispensed seed. The oats, barley and wheat were shipped here to become the seed grain for farmers in this district.
“Originally,” George Moore said, “the grain came in from western Canada on flat cars and they shoveled it into holding areas for farmers here. Then, when things got really busy, they put in those silos.”
But, as I say, those silos, as well as the adjoining mill and the Co-Op store, where many long-time residents earned a decent wage selling everything from dry goods to groceries will soon come down. Sometime in the next year, the new owners of the property – First Leaside Securities – will bring those grain facilities down and erect new corporate head offices. And the buildings’ demise will signal the end of an era when granaries were king.
Just to give you a sense of the drastic change in this country’s agricultural skyline, I checked into the state of Canada’s granaries. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia website, in 1933 at the peak of grain elevator construction, there were more than 5,700 grain elevators in western Canada.
At their zenith, those 30 to 40,000-bushel grain elevators, reaching 80 to 100 feet into the air, dotted both the CPR and CNR lines every nine or 10 miles (roughly the distance a farmer’s team of horses and dray could cover in a day to deliver grain for storage). Today, Saskatchewan and Alberta have fewer than 300 of those so-called “cathedrals” of farm culture.
I have a fleeting connection to farm granaries on the prairies of western Canada. As a young man, just beginning my journalism career, I lived in Saskatchewan for a few years. In that part of the world when someone asked for help on the farm, there was only one response: “When do I start?” Well, it was the autumn of 1972. I was asked to assist a friend bring in his wheat harvest. I would drive a hopper truck from this man’s wheat fields – in middle of the grain belt between Regina and Moose Jaw – back to his granaries.
We started on Friday afternoon. We worked well after dark. I recall sitting in the hopper truck under a starry night, watching two combines, with lights illuminating the ground way off in the distance, make the long circuit around the ripened wheat stand. They stopped only long enough to dispense their precious grain cargo into the box of my hopper truck. Then I drove through the dark to the man’s steel granaries on the home quarter section. There I set the auger running, slowly tipped the hopper truck box to dispense the grain and watched it shoot out the top of the auger into the granary. We worked round-the-clock for nearly three days and filled that man’s half dozen granaries with tonnes of golden wheat kernels.
I thought about those seeds of 1972 and of the millions of seeds that have fuelled the farm economy in this part of the world, as I walked to the Co-Op silos on Sunday. And I took a few photographs through the restraining fences now erected around the now derelict site. I know the new construction there will hopefully bring a new kind of prosperity to that side of downtown.
But I couldn’t stop thinking about George Moore’s time at the Co-Op, when workers dispensed new seed and a different kind of prosperity to their farm customers nearly a century ago.