When Jane Ross drives along Alberta highways she’s no longer sure to see the tall elevators marking each town along the road.
Ross can’t stop the demolition of the more than 500 grain elevators in the province, but she’s doing her part to preserve the elevators through a photo search and contest.
“I want to trace the history of the buildings. I want the history of every elevator in every town,” said Ross, curator of the Western Canadian history program at the Provincial Museum in Edmonton.
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Ross’s quest is twofold. She’s hoping Albertans will search through their photo albums for archival pictures of their town’s elevators and she wants Albertans to get out and take photos of elevators still standing.
She wants photographs of old and new elevators, inside or out, in use or abandoned, alone or in a row, and under construction or destruction.
Submissions will be accepted until Nov. 1 next year, so she is encouraging photographers to send a series of images taken at different times of year to reflect the elevator and its place in the community.
“We’re not only looking for photographs with good composition but also for photographs with good documentation content,” said Ross.
The photos could show a row of elevators at Vulcan in each decade to help fill the historical blanks missing from the museum’s collection.
“I want to know what Vulcan looked like in the Sixties.”
Ross said only after elevators are torn down do many people realize how deeply their physical presence is imbedded in the prairie psyche.
The familiar elevators are on beer labels, there are bird houses that look like miniature grain elevators and even roadside garbage cans in the shape of grain elevators.
But the colorful presence of wooden elevators along the railway are being replaced with efficient, concrete monoliths.
“You have these ugly concrete things with the exposed distributor cones on top. That’s what we’ll be looking at.”
Not trusting that her efforts will capture every elevator, Ross has hired a contractor to photograph every elevator still standing.
In Manitoba, a photographer has just finished photographing every elevator in that province. In Saskatchewan, a project is “woefully underfunded” and is in danger of ending before it is finished, she said.
The project is divided into four categories: professional archival and professional current, and amateur archival and amateur current. All the photos submitted will be digitized and stored on CD ROM for museum research.
About 50 or 60 photos will be chosen for a traveling exhibit of
Alberta museums.
For more information contact Jane Ross at 403-453-9176.
