Seventy-nine boxes found in storage locker | Documents capture the day-to-day grain workings from 1960s to 1980s
Who wants to wade through box after box after box of old, yellowed grain industry documents from the late 1960s to the early 1980s?
Richard Phillips does, for one.
And the president of the Canada Grains Council is hoping others are as excited as he is about the prospect of preserving some almost forgotten western Canadian grain industry history.
“History is important,” said Phillips as he sorted through letters, reports, VHS tapes, cassettes, published books of statistics and estimates and other flotsam and jetsam of the Canada Grains Council’s formative years.
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“I think people gave their lives, they worked hard, people put their entire careers into this industry to help make it a better place, and this is all documented,” he said.
Phillips is the kind of guy who takes work home with him from the office, and the walls of his downtown Winnipeg apartment are stacked with the council’s stored archives from the pre-digital age.
The 79 boxes had been sitting in storage for more than a decade, and the organization decided to take a look to see if they were worth saving.
“Nobody had even visited the storage locker in 12 years,” said Phillips.
“So we said, ‘well, it’s no use paying storage if we’re not even going to have a look at it.’ So we moved all the storage boxes over here to my apartment.”
The boxes contain a treasure trove of Canadian grain industry history, with detailed letters going back and forth between grain company, government, railway, trading and farm leaders about the tempestuous issues of the time.
It was a time when the Crow Rate still existed, when the industry investigated the merits of exporting “royal jelly” to Japan for a market of “old man with young wife” and when fava beans looked like the crop of the future.
It was also a time, like today, when grain logistics and railway problems occupied much attention and provoked much wrath.
Phillips said he and his staff are using moments between other tasks to sort through the boxes during the day at the grain council office and at his apartment at night, but they don’t know where they’ll end up.
They will probably need to document and describe each paper to get them into provincial or federal archives, which would be a daunting task.
Phillips said he’s sorting through the boxes to hone down the collection from its present polyglot to one in which everything of significance is saved and passed on. Much of what’s in the boxes isn’t crucial CGC history.
However, among it all are hundreds of reports and letters that will only exist with the CGC now. Looking through the type-written and hand-written letters, one comes across the names of dozens of grain industry luminaries of those days and can view the internal debates and arguments of the industry at the time.
Phillips, who clearly revels in these raw historical materials as he sorts, said he hopes some archival authority is willing to preserve them once they are collated.
“We’re looking for articles of historical significance,” said Phillips.
“We’re going to try to find a home for some of this. Preferably the archives will keep it because there’s so much rich history here.”
