Beacons
A grain elevator should not be sentimental.
But alas, it is.
Mom would throw us girls in the station wagon, and head out to the west. The GREAT north west – but not the one you're thinking.
We lived in East Tennessee at the time. The station wagon was the type with the wood paneling. When you see photos, you can imagine the desaturated colors of the beige and brown. I think camera companies purposely made film to be desaturated when processed. Everything back then was desaturated, even in real life.
If you've seen old photos, you know what I mean.
All four of us girls would settle into our spots in the car. I liked the back seat that faced the rear window. It was the kind that folded up from its little hiding spot in the very back when you needed it. Like, when my mom had 4 young rowdy girls.
I used this back window as my windshield and pretended I was driving.
It took us four days.
How did my mom do it? She was (is) a determined woman. My dad traveled a lot in the mining industry. So she would pack us up and head to where she grew up in the plains (is it IN the plains or ON the plains...) in a very tiny town in Saskatchewan. Because of this 4 long day trip, I would stare out the windows and watch the world come into view and then disappear.
The grain elevators were a sign we were close to our destination. They stood so tall on the vast open plains. Then there would be another, and another. As I typed these last 2 lines, I'm having a eureka moment.
"I knew we were getting close".
These wooden grain elevators were beacons of hope. They were signs that I could finally be out of the car! I would be at my nana and grandpa's house in just a few more hours. This is starting to make sense.
Fast forward to today, I am still enamored with architecture, especially the old kind. I've drawn numerous landmarks and buildings in the last several years. And I am finding the more I paint, the more I see I need to paint! Preservation Postcards came about in 2020 when a local store was looking for some buildings to be painted. This in itself may have been a God-wink.
Why this grain elevator?
A cousin had posted that this was the last in the town of Davidson and was being razed. I knew I needed to draw it. I knew it would be another piece in the Preservation Postcard series. I knew I needed to get a little bit of information I could find about it to give it its last little glory. Kind of like its own building obituary.
This is the information I found and is now on its own Preservation Postcard:
Circa 1930. Grain elevators are known as the “Prairie Sentinels”. This is last of seven original wood elevators located in Davidson, SK. It was owned by Saskatchewan Wheat Pool until it was sold in 2001. Pool had a system of numbering, this is N. In 2026, during its demolition, the worn white painted wood shows the very faint Pool logo under the red aluminum siding. Grain elevator was located on Railway Street / SK-44.
Why does it make me sad to see something so grand disappear? Why does it hurt my heart to see icons go away? I could guess a few things. I could guess that it's about the stories and the years that have passed through its doors. I could guess because many other little kids probably marked them as beacons, knowing they were going to be home soon.
Of course, they still are around, just in a different form. But it is definitely hard to say goodbye to something you've so often seen and loved.
They were to the prairies what the lighthouses are to the coast.
This is a human written blog. All grammar and copywriting errors are my own.
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