Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1998
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 4, Fall 1998, pp. 305-25
Abstract
Driving west from Interstate 35 on US Highway 64, the grain elevators of Enid, Oklahoma, first become visible when the town is still twenty miles away. Disappearing and reappearing behind gently rolling hills, it is initially unclear what they might be. Even when they are little more than white specks on the horizon, they are plainly too large and numerous to represent some distant farmstead. They are too long to suggest the form of a far-off skyscraper. Little by little they grow larger in the windshield, and as the stony hills begin to give way to the wheat-covered plains of western Oklahoma a few miles east of town, an awe-inspiring spectacle reveals itself. Nine enormous grain elevators, some taller than anything between Oklahoma City and Denver and as long as five football fields placed end-to-end, form a wall of concrete on one side of Enid. There may not be a more imposing sight in rural America.
Though grain elevators dot the landscape all across the Great Plains, in no other place are there so many that are so large in so small an area. Enid has a dozen grain elevators in all, and together they can hold more than seventy million bushels of grain, nearly half the volume of wheat Oklahoma produces in a typical year. This tremendous concentration of storage helped make Enid the wheat capital of the Southwest by the 1950s and a grain center of international importance as home to the largest wheat-exporting organization in the world. At one time, Enid boasted the second largest grain storage capacity of any city in the nation. It is also home to what was once the largest grain elevator in existence. A unique grain bin design, significant not only for its efficiency but because of its distinctive look, was first developed there. Towering over the town and visible from such a great distance, the grain elevators of Enid came to represent the city, and at times Oklahoma, throughout the nation.
Comments
Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska- Lincoln