American Monuments

The American photographer Frank Gohlke has said "The grain elevator is the essential American monument.  No other structure so completely testifies to the vastness of the American landscape and the magnitude of its production."  Driving from Minneapolis-St. Paul airport to downtown, I passed a huge number of different grain elevators stretching nearly a mile. On my last day in Minnesota, I drove back to the site and spent a couple of hours photographing these structures.  They are enormous - most are one-hundred feet tall or more.  They are used for storing grain received from farmers, before being shipped to processors.  In Minneapolis, many of these storage facilities were used to store wheat, before being ground into flour by all the mills along the Mississippi River.  Please click on each of these to see them in more detail.