The Val Marie Elevator: A Living Heritage Project

. . .T H E W A Y I T I S N O W E r v i n C a r l i e r J r. levators were placed on the prairies following a simple pattern.

Every ten or twelve miles the railroad would designate a spot on the railway where elevators would be built. The subsequent communities would follow, built to support the elevators and the railways. These became the iconic pictures so familiar to us on the prairies – the image of long stretches of cultivation and farms broken up by the giant grain sentinels.

But every now and then, a picture would arise of a community and of an elevator that wasn’t quite like the rest, where the giants would still rise but would be enveloped by what was already there. The hills and the prairie would continue to exist beside the newcomers. The new didn’t take over the old but instead, became part of it.

This is the way it is with Val Marie. The ancient valley and ageless prairie still exist up to the base of the elevator. Some land is cultivated but the prairie dogs and rattlesnakes and antelope still live on land left untouched by the plough. In Val Marie, there is the mix of the old and the new as it was almost 100 years ago and how it is today. It is a place that works its way into the soul of the resident and of the visitor. It is a place that one never quite forgets (or ever quite leaves, for that matter).

It must have signalled a place of permanence for the early settlers. People were everywhere. Schools dotted the landscape wherever there were enough children. Built in the most inhospitable places, really. The communities had their stores, streets and churches.

But “this great and strange and savage land” had the final say. Droughts, the Great Depression and terrible poverty took its toll. The schools, and the churches and the communities lost their people and thereby lost themselves.

The last to go were the giants – the grain elevators. More than ever they came to resemble lonely sentinels latched onto the railway with only a few outbuildings. Some even survived the abandonment of the railroads – at least for a while.

Most old elevators, in the thousands, are gone now. Farms remain, but on