CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Prairie Grain Elevators

Paragraph A

For much of the twentieth century, the tall wooden grain elevator was the most recognizable building on the Canadian Prairies. In most towns it was by far the tallest structure. Rising high above the flat landscape, usually with the name of a grain company and of the town painted in large letters on its side, an elevator could be seen from many kilometres away, and travellers often used the next one on the horizon to work out how far they still had to go. Some writers called them the “sentinels of the Prairies.” Their purpose, however, was entirely practical. Farmers brought their harvest to the elevator, where it was weighed, graded and stored before being loaded into railway cars and sent on to ports for export.

Paragraph B

The elevators spread with the railways. As rail lines pushed across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta in the late 1800s and early 1900s, elevators went up beside the tracks, often only 10 to 15 kilometres apart. That distance was no accident: a farmer hauling grain by horse and wagon needed to be able to reach an elevator, unload and return home in a single day. Small towns frequently grew up around these stops, with a general store, a post office and a school, and some of them disappeared again when their rail line later closed. By the 1930s, there were more than 5,000 elevators across the Prairies.

Paragraph C

Inside, the design was simple but clever. Grain tipped from a wagon fell into a pit, where a continuous belt fitted with small buckets, known as the “leg,” carried it to the top of the building. From there, gravity did the rest: the grain slid down a spout into one of many separate bins, so that different kinds and grades never mixed. The walls were often made of wooden planks laid flat and nailed one on top of another, which made them remarkably strong. Running the elevator was a respected job, and the agent usually knew every farmer for miles around. Fire was a constant danger, because grain dust burns easily.

Paragraph D

The decline began in the second half of the twentieth century. Trucks replaced wagons, farms grew larger, and many rail branch lines were abandoned. The end of a long-standing federal subsidy on grain shipping in the 1990s sped up the change. Grain companies replaced hundreds of small wooden elevators with a smaller number of large concrete terminals, each able to load a long train quickly. Many of the old buildings were torn down or lost to fire, and only a small fraction survive today. Some communities, however, have saved theirs as museums or heritage sites, and in Inglis, Manitoba, a row of old elevators has been preserved as a national historic site.