The Invisible Forest
First allow me to make a somewhat heretical confession: I don’t much care for the look of the poured-concrete grain elevators—the ones whose tubular silos remind me of a giant version of the coin-changer the paperboy used to carry when I was a kid.
‘Elevator Alley’ © André Carrotflower (Used by permission per Wikipedia.)
Tastes differ, of course, but mine leans toward the older and more angular elevators, which seem to me like something from a Cubist painting.
Now that we have that out of the way, we’ll go back to a time—1880—when all the latest and greatest of Buffalo’s grain elevators were these angular structures. And since geometry always puts me in mind of high school mathematics, let’s look at a few numbers. Bear with me—it’ll be worth it.
These old-style elevators were (mainly) made of incredible quantities of wood. To erect Clark’s Niagara B, the elevator we’ll examine today, required 500,000 board feet of oak timber, 3,000,000 lineal feet of two-inch-thick floor planking, and 764,000 board feet of pine timber.
Here’s what its smaller sister, Niagara A, looked like in its 1870 heyday (the larger one behind the smokestack). Niagara B was twice her size.
Courtesy of Library of Congress
It took five hundred men a year to assemble this behemoth, at a cost of some $2 million ($100 million today), all in. At the time Niagara B opened for business, in mid-1881, it was the largest grain elevator in the world, with a capacity of about one-and-a-quarter million bushels of grain. (The Great Northern could hold more than double that!)
Now let’s think for a moment how much the Niagara B elevator weighed empty. Seasoned oak weighs about 3 ½ pounds per board foot, and pine about 2 ½ . So roughly—not including equipment, of course—the structure alone of Niagara B carried aloft 1 ¾ million pounds of oak, almost 2 million pounds of pine, and then all that planking, which I estimate weighed another two million pounds. All told, Niagara B’s framing accounted for almost six million pounds of wood.
Now fill that massive structure with one-and-a-quarter million bushels of wheat at sixty pounds per bushel—that’s seventy-five million pounds of grain—and the beast now tips the scales at more than eighty million pounds. And all of this tonnage is supported by . . . a twenty-foot-thick layer of soft muck along the bank of a sluggish river.
How in the world does all that bulk not simply sink out of sight?
The answer is that the story of wood continues below the surface. Beneath Niagara B (and any other elevator) is what I like to think of as an ‘invisible forest’, huge pilings (or ‘spiles’) pounded into the mud until they came to rest on bedrock. Since bedrock is some twenty feet below the waterline of the Buffalo River, these pilings were full grown trees—many of them old-growth timber from Michigan or from Mississippi’s Yazoo River ‘Delta Country’, which was at that time being clear-cut to make way for more cotton production.
Driving piles into soggy soil is not a new technology, though Buffalo’s elevators must be one of its most demanding applications. Venice (Italy) and Amsterdam (Holland) are but two of many cities that are built atop pilings—but those are homes and modestly-sized commercial structures, not eighty-million-pound, moveable machines.
Accordingly the mighty Niagara B required 4,000 of these pilings to keep all that weight from sinking down to bedrock, and each was made of a beech or maple tree some two feet in diameter—by my calculations another six million pounds of timber underground. These pilings extended from bedrock to the low-water level of the river (more on that later), and then were capped with stone. Then the elevator itself rested on this foundation.
Imagine that! Niagara B’s wooden structure weighed six million pounds, and it took that much wood again to hold it up. And though the Niagara B elevator is long gone, all of those pilings are still there, an underwater mirror-image of the elevator itself. Here’s a way to visualize it:
Buffalo Photo Blog, Flickr
Courtesy Library of Congress
You may wonder if all that wood has simply rotted away in the soggy mud. It has not, for two reasons. One is that the mud is deep enough and stable enough that there isn’t much if any destructive oxygen dissolved in it. Critters that eat wood can’t live in this ‘anoxic’ environment, so any tree with a decent level of rot resistance can remain submerged for centuries without much degradation. The only time this is problematic is when water level varies widely and exposes the tops of pilings (think about exposed dock pilings in tidal areas) to oxygen and to cycles of wetting and drying, which also favor bacterial growth.
When the people who knocked over the Great Northern wanted to find a legal way to do it, among the claims made was that Buffalo’s water levels had varied enough over the years that the wooden pilings holding up the old structure were in danger of failure from this wet/dry cycle of decay. Actually the data show that only on very rare occasions does water level fall below the low-water mark, so I’d bet anyone a dozen Paula’s Donuts that if you dug up one of the 6,000 old support pilings from beneath the new Great Northern parking lot.
Of course you’ll be prohibited from doing so, even as an experiment—and probably locked up for your trouble—so please don’t. We must content ourselves that truth, like wood, remains sound even when buried.
You can find more articles like this here on Robert’s blog and also on his weekly column on Buffalo Rising.