Preservers of the Historic Ma & Pa Railroad
Preservers of the Historic Ma & Pa Railroad
The exact date of construction of the grain elevator has not been established, but it was probably built in 1903. The elevator, which is also water powered, has a capacity of 9000 bushels of grain, stored in eight bins. The grain elevator on this site was probably first built by James Maffet. The elevator was expanded and modernized by A. M. Grove in the 1890's.
It contains nine grain bins, each of which holds 1000 bushels of grain. In front of the loading doors (in the ground) is the loading door where you can see a metal plate. This covers a hopper, originally under the railroad siding, through which grain was fed into the elevator. A farmer bringing his grain to sell would first have his loaded wagon weighed by the warehouse man on the large scale in the scale house directly across the road from the elevator. He would then cross the road, shovel the grain from his wagon into the hopper, and return to the scale house where his empty wagon would be weighed to determine the quantity of grain for which he should be paid. It was also possible to unload grain from railroad boxcars spotted on the siding into the hopper. A screw auger carried the grain from the hopper to the bottom of the switching tower of the elevator. Here the grain was picked up by a bucket elevator, a series of metal cups on a fabric belt, which carried it to the top of the tower where it was routed into one of the grain bins.
Although A. M. Grove ground some of the grain delivered to the elevator into flour, most of the grain was stored until it could be sold at a profit to grain dealers in Baltimore. Grain was shipped in boxcars, equipped with temporary grain doors, that were loaded directly through chutes from the elevator