Grain Elevators

Buffalo Grain Elevator Preserve - Table of Contents ............... Grain Elevators - Table of Contents ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, Public Art - Table of Contents

General Mills and St. Mary's Elevators
By Dennis Galucki and Chuck LaChiusa
Center for the Study of Art, Architecture, History and Nature

On this page, below:

Frontier / Washburn Crosby / General Mills elevators

General Mills Mural

Spencer Kellogg Elevator / Schaefer Brewing / St. Mary's Cement Elevator

Frontier / Washburn Crosby / General Mills elevators

54 S. Michigan Ave, Buffalo, NY

History of the site:

1886 - Frontier Elevator was incorporated by six local businessmen for the purpose of elevating, storing, and transferring grain and for building and managing elevators.

1903 Washburn Crosby built a brick flour mill next to Frontier and paid Frontier to use its marine towers to receive grain from the lake ships, then transferor agreed-on amounts of wheat via conveyor from its elevator's tanks to Washburn Crosby's.

1907 Washburn Crosby bought Frontier

1909-1925 Four elevator building permits approved

1913 The Buffalo facility was the fourth largest elevating and milling complex in the country, surpassed only by three Minneapolis operations

1928 Washburn Crosby changed its name to General Mills

1930 Buffalo surpassed Minneapolis as the flour milling center of the nation

1934 Wheaties debut

1941 Cheeri-Oats debut (1945 became Cheerios)

1941 Produced thirty separate lines including six cereals, eight cake mixes, various cookie mixes, and other items. Much of the Cheerios consumed in America came from the Buffalo plant, as did a large portion of Gold Medal flour.

1964 the Buffalo plant remained the largest of all General Mills operations

Main source: HABS:Washburn Crosby Elevator (online July 2016)

Frontier / Washburn Crosby / General Mills Elevators

2013 photo

Frontier / Washburn Crosby / General Mills Elevators

Reprint
Buffalo: Lake City in Niagara Land
By Richard C. Brown and Bob Watson.
USA: Windsor Publications, 1981, p. 285

Frontier / Washburn Crosby / General Mills Elevators

The large General Mills elevating and milling complex at 54 South Michigan Street began as a small Buffalo-owned elevator company, Frontier Elevator, incorporated by six local businessmen in 1886. The Frontier has a capacity of 4.75 million bushels and was the largest of Buffalo's 21 elevators in operation at the time.

In 1903 a new flour milling company came to buffalo from Minneapolis, the Washburn Crosby Company. The mill was built next to the Frontier on the site of the old Dakota Mill that had burned some years earlier. The company's tile storage tanks lacked marine legs. Washburn Crosby made an agreement with Frontier for unloading and transferring grain. In 1907 Washburn Crosby bought out Frontier.

In 1928 General Mills was organized in Buffalo with Washburn Crosby as its nucleus. The Buffalo operation has made the Gold Medal brand flour as well as Wheaties, Bisquick, Betty Crocker mixes and Cheerios (originally called Cheerioats).

By 1964, General Mills owned O-Cell-O, a manufacturer of synthetic sponges, and Kittinger Furniture.

Other elevator additions on the site were constructed of concrete, although the only remaining tile elevator in Buffalo is still part of the complex.

Sources:

Built in America

"Buffalo: Lake City in Niagara Land,"by Richard C. Brown and Bob Watson. USA: Windsor Publications, 1981

See also: HABS (online April 2015)

Frontier / Washburn Crosby / General Mills Elevators

Tile Bins
Extract from the Nomination to the City of Buffalo for landmarking the Great Northern Grain Elevator

At the end of the 1890's, two means for more rigid fireproof construction came from Minneapolis: the tile bin and the reinforced concrete bin.

Tile Bin: The tile bin was short lived but conceptually important. Bins were made of tile construction reinforced with steel, a technology that came from the tile-built, steel-rod-reinforced floors and internal partitions used in big cities like Chicago at that time. The dominant system for tile bins was patented in 1895 by the Barnett-Record (Johnson-Record) Company of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the system was proven in 1899 when a single experimental tank was built and evaluated in Minneapolis.

The first phase of Buffalo's Washburn-Crosby (now General Mills) Elevator consists of a set of nine Johnson-Record tile bins. They date from 1903 and were attached to a six-story, brick pier milling building, designed by Buffalo's Reidpath office.

Buffalo's Plympton Elevator stood from 1869 until 1902 and was a brick ancestor of the final tile system. Ernest V. Johnson (the Johnson of the John- son Record system and son of George H. Johnson, the pioneer of fireproof elevator construction) constructed the iron and brick elevator in Buffalo. Special interlocking bricks were used with no exterior walling with successful protection against the exterior climate.

Banham ((Reyner Banham, "A Concrete Atlantis," p. 134)) described the technology:

The basic technology of the system proven by the test bin built in 1899 was by modern standards a hybrid, consisting of a circular wall laid up of two leaves of special square tile. The inner and outer leaves were grouted together without a cavity, and the tensional loads were taken up by hoops of two-inch steel strap between the leaves.

Although this system proved entirely satisfactory, to judge from observations made three years later, it was substantially simplified in the improved version commonly employed thereafter. The latter used a single-leaf structural wall made of alternating courses of short and tall tiles; the short ones were hollow troughs into which the steel reinforcing rings were laid and then grouted down solid.

Early versions of the simplified system apparently had a layer of glazed tiles lining the inner face of the wall to protect the grain or to prevent it from catching during discharge, but this was deemed unnecessary and these "furring" tiles were transferred to the outer face of the wall to protect the main structure against damage by external fire and weather.

For a short period - barely a decade - the developed Johnson system must have been highly acceptable to the trade, for a very large number were built and still stand in their naturally handsome brown-to-purple, salt-glazed color range, a familiar part of the urban scenery of the elevator districts of cities from the Midwest up into Canada and across to the East Coast.

General Mills Elevators

2016 Products:

Flour: packaged in 50 & 100 lb bags for commercial use; the largest customer for this product is NYC pizzerias

Cereal: Cheerios & Lucky Charms for the northeastern US, Canada, & Iceland. They have boxes in the plant printed in Icelandic. Coming soon will be Chex production.

2016 Production - average output:

Flour mill: 17.5 million lbs/day (record: 17.8 million lbs produced & packed in one day)
Cereal: 760,000 lbs of cereal produced per day
These lines typically run about 290 days per year

2016 Operations:

The cereal plant is now entirely gluten-free; while it does have the ability to make Wheaties and Total (which have gluten), those have not been made in Buffalo for several years

All of the grain coming in on the American Mariner is wheat for the flour mill, coming from a General Mills grain elevator in Duluth, Minnesota; the cereal ingredients come in by rail or truck

All remaining manlifts were removed from the plant in the past 2 years

Silos are still cleaned by lowering in a worker (a contractor) from the top of the silo, and are cleaned at least once per year in this way

The flour mill is fumigated 3 or 4 times per year, which is a 3-day process when the entire plant is shutdown

In 2013, the warehouse was switched to an Automated Guided Vehicle system (robots move all of the pallets around). The warehouse has space for 15,000 pallets.

2016 Employment:

Approximately 450 workers total
Approx. 100 admin employees
Approx. 330 production employees
Average production employee has 20 years of service at General Mills
Some seasonal employees are brought on during the summer, and for when the American Mariner docks and unloads

History:

1903 - Flour mill built by Washburn-Crosby, the second built by the company that become General Mills, followed by "B" mill in 1910
1941 - Cereal plant opened, making Cheeri-Oats, Kix, Wheaties, & Bisquick - this year is the cereal plant's 75th anniversary
1961 - A + B flour mills replaced by modern Bellera Mill
The General Mills plant in Buffalo has been kept open largely due to the advantage of its location, which has excellent access to a majority of both the US & Canadian markets, and in spite of higher labor costs here. The ability to bring in grain by ship is also a major advantage as it is far more cost effective than rail or truck.

Postcard

General Mills Elevator
2004 photos - unless indicated otherwise

2015 photo

General Mills framed by the Skyway - 2004 photo

General Mills on Kelly Island ... - 2004 photo ... Buffalo Ship Canal

General Mills - 2004 photo

General Mills ... 2004 photo ... Silos with mainhouse above

General Mills - 2004 photo

General Mills Mural
By Nicole Cherry

September 1, 2020 photos

View from Michigan Avenue: the foot of Michigan Avenue ... Buildings are part of the General Mills complex ... Note red and white barrier, detailed below:

Behind the barrier and trees: Buffalo River and the site of the Michigan Avenue Wooden Bridge which connected Michigan Avenue and Kelly Island. ... The bridge was demolished in the 1950s after a boat accident badly damaged the bridge.

Note the c. 1903 smokestack, detailed below:

C. 1903 Washburn Crosby Co.

Historic millstones which were used to mill (crush) grain ... For another example, see Williamsville Village Hall

By Nicole Cherry ... Three mural details below:

By Nicole Cherry

Spencer Kellogg Elevator / Schaefer Brewing / St. Mary's Cement Elevator
389 Ganson Street, Buffalo

History of the site:

? - Coatsworth wooden elevator built on north side of the slip

1890s - Spencer Kellogg wooden elevator built on south side of the slip

1893 - Coatsworth burned down

1894 - Replacement Coatsworth built

1903 - New brick Kellogg elevator built

1901-1910? - Kellogg acquired the Coatsworth which became Kellogg "A"; the original Kellogg became Kellogg "B"

1910 - Kellogg "A" (former Coatsworth) replaced with reinforced concrete elevator

1912 - Original Kellogg elevator ("B") demolished and replaced with a single loading bin; the overhead gantry constructed

1923 - Single loading bin augmented by 4 steel bins and one interstitial bin

The earliest elevator built on the Wadham Slip (later renamed the Spencer Kellogg Slip), was the wooden Coatsworth Elevator The second Coatsworth Elevator became the Kellogg "A" Elevator.

Spencer Kellogg's grandfather began milling linseed oil in 1824 in the Mohawk Valley near Amsterdam, New York.

Spencer Kellogg moved to Buffalo and, at age 28, built his first linseed oil mill in 1879. By 1894, he constructed a second mill, giving him a total of 36 presses, making his the largest linseed oil plant in the U.S. The company existed in Buffalo from 1879 to 1961, growing from a modest one-man operation to become a diversified international enterprise operating in eight states and several foreign countries.

The elevator consists of a large set of bins joined at the top through a 1917 transfer system to a small collection of bins on the south, with a gap of perhaps 150 feet between. The reason for this odd setup is that there was once a slip here underneath the transfer system (see photo showing the slip). Two vessels could be handled at the same time.

Instead of storing grain, the elevators now store cement.

- Sources:

Western New York Heritage Press (includes photos)

Built in America

Buffalo's Waterfront: A Guidebook