By James Heinz
Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t beer that made Milwaukee famous. It was grain that put Milwaukee on the map. In the 1840s Milwaukee was a bigger city than Chicago. Before the coming of the railroads, everything that moved in the Great Lakes region went by ship. And Milwaukee had a key advantage over Chicago.
It was called Milwaukee Bay.
The Bay provided protection from wind and waves, which made it much easier and safer for ships to approach Milwaukee and try to enter its narrow harbor, which at first consisted of a narrow, marshy opening at the south end of what is now Jones Island. Chicago has no bay to protect ships at their most vulnerable point in their voyage: going in and out of harbor.
According to noted Great Lakes historian Brendon Baillod, as late as the 1870s, if you ate a ham sandwich in New York City, the wheat in the bread probably came from Milwaukee.
In 2023 a new facility opened on Jones Island within the confines of Port Milwaukee that will continue Milwaukee’s long tradition of moving amber waves of grain to market.
Traditionally, grain has been loaded into grain elevators. And like everything else, grain elevators have an origin story. The grain elevator was born on the Great Lakes, in the grain handling port of Buffalo, New York.
In 1842 grain was still moved around by hand the same way it had been moved in the Middle Ages. A Buffalo merchant name Joseph Dart thought that there had to be a better way to transship grain, and he hired engineer Robert Dunbar to build it. It used a steam powered device to scoop grain from ship’s holds and a conveyor belt to move it to the top of a vertical storage tower.
In the words of Wikipedia: “…the wooden elevators of the day were quite vulnerable to fire, as they were built of flammable material, filled with volatile grain dust, and usually stood next to railroad tracks with their spark-spewing locomotives. Numerous elevator fires were causing insurance rates to skyrocket.”
In 1899 a man named Frank Peavey decided that there had to be a better way to transship grain. He hired engineer Charles Haglin to build the first modern grain elevator in St. Louis Park, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis.
Haglin built a cylindrical concrete tower 125 feet tall. It had an interior diameter of 20 feet and the walls tapered from 12 inches thick at the base to 8 inches thick at the top. The locals called it “Peavey’s Folly” and remained at a respectful distance when it was first tested. Contrary to their expectations, the elevator did not collapse and in fact still stands in St. Louis Park.
The design was quickly adopted all over the Midwest, and the cylindrical grain elevator rapidly became a feature of the Midwestern landscape, the elevators often being the tallest structure around.
Although immune to fire, concrete elevators were prone to grain dust explosions. Once again Wikipedia tells us: “In the past, grain elevators sometimes experienced silo explosions. Fine powder from the millions of grains passing through the facility would accumulate and mix with the oxygen in the air. A spark could spread from one floating particle to the other, creating a chain reaction that would destroy the entire structure.” A 2003 fire in a Canadian grain elevator took seven hours to extinguish.
And once again, someone thought that there had to be a better way to transship grain, and the DeLong Company developed it. Last summer I spoke with company executive Pat DeLong on Jones Island.
In an era in which Internet start-ups start up every few minutes, and have a life expectancy of about the same, the DeLong Co., Inc. is a 6th generation family owned and operated business that has been in the grain business since it started in 1913 in Avalon, Wis. The company currently has 38 facilities in 7 states.
The company lists innovation as one of its values and in the fall of 2021, it lived up to that value when it decided that there had to be a better way to transship grain. The company began construction of a new type of grain handling facility on Milwaukee’s Jones Island.
The start of construction revealed the history of Jones Island. The Island was originally a much thinner ribbon of sand, and the lagoon on the west side, now the Inner Harbor, was much larger. During World War II the federal government filled in the west side of the island to increase its width. Pat DeLong told me that the fill was “poor soil” and they had to drive 1,100 steel pilings to support the new facility.
The facility took 15 months to build and cost $40 million. It opened July 13, 2023. It occupies 4.4 acres. It was built with a mixture of federal, state, and local financing along with DeLong money. It is the largest structure built on the island since the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway and is the first of its kind on the Great Lakes.
Although DeLong developed it, the facility was realized by working closely with WMHS board member Peter Hirthe, who was the former trade development representative at Port Milwaukee.
Instead of a tubular concrete structure, the new facility consists of three separate structures. Just east of Carferry Drive is the receiving facility. Rail cars and trucks drive into the building and discharge their cargoes via gravity dump hoppers through grates in the floor into holding rooms below the floor of the facility. An adjacent rail yard can hold 110 hopper rail cars. The facility can unload 30 large trucks an hour.
Grain is then transferred across Carferry Drive by an overhead skyway conveyor system over the street, where it is deposited in the product storage building on the west side of the street, which is actually built of fabric. It can hold 30,000 tons of grain products. Additional metal silos can store more grain.
From there the grain is moved into a tower like structure where a bucket elevator system inside moves it up into the sky in a manner similar to the old grain elevators. The grain then slides down inside the tower into a remote-controlled moveable arm that swings out over the harbor on the west side of the island.
A retractable spout at the end of the arm can be swung out over the hold of a docked ship to distribute the grain into the different holds of the ship. This minimizes having to move the ship to be sure that the cargo is evenly distributed so that the ship is properly trimmed. The spout can discharge 40,000 bushels an hour or 16,000 tons a day.
The fire hazard of the original grain elevators has not been forgotten. Pat DeLong said that rub blocks, speed sensors, and temperature sensors monitor the grain and there are explosion relief valves throughout the tower and boom.
So, what kind of grain is being exported? At the time I spoke to Pat DeLong he said it was something called DDGS: dry distiller’s grain with solubles, a by-product of ethanol production from corn. The facility can also handle corn, corn gluten feed pellets, soybeans, and soybean meal used as animal feed. DeLong expects to ship most of its grain to Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
The first vessel to be loaded at the new facility was the Dutch freighter EBROBORG, which loaded 7,250 metric tons of DDGS in late June 2023. The facility can export 400,000 tons annually.
Once again, Milwaukee is moving America’s amber waves of grain to a hungry world.
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James Heinz is the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s acquisitions director. He became interested in maritime history as a kid watching Jacques Cousteau’s adventures on TV. He was a Great Lakes wreck diver until three episodes of the bends forced him to retire from diving. He was a University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee police officer for thirty years. He regularly flies either a Cessna 152 or 172.
Photos courtesy of DeLong Co., Inc., Port of Milwaukee and James Heinz
This story was originally posted July 7, 2024.
