For more than a century and a half, grain elevators have played a critical role in the fall harvest.

Before elevators arrived on the scene, farmers scooped shelled corn or other grain into sacks, loaded them onto wagons or flatboats, and made the trip to river markets like Peoria or St. Louis. Ownership of these sacks remained with the farmer or grain dealer until they reached the final point of sale.

Steam-powered elevators and railroads profoundly altered this arrangement. Elevators - multistoried warehouses partitioned into vertical bins - mixed similarly graded grain from one farmer with that of another. Grading by type and quality was a new concept. Instead of associating a specific lot of grain with its owner, it was given a grade (such as No. 2 winter wheat) and placed in a designated bin. "Sackless" grain (whether it was wheat, corn, oats or other crops) behaved less like a solid object and more like a liquid, and this golden torrent could be efficiently loaded onto railcars and shipped quickly to elevator and milling centers like Buffalo, Chicago and Minneapolis.

The first such elevator was built in 1842-1843 in Buffalo, N.Y., and a decade later similar structures began popping up all over Central Illinois.

The Logan County community of Atlanta is home to the J.W. Hawes Grain Elevator Museum. Built in 1903, visitors can see firsthand how grain was moved from wagon to wooden elevator to railroad car for much of the 20th century.

The Hawes elevator includes a restored 1920 Fairbanks-Morse gasoline engine located in an adjacent brick engine house. This working engine turns a power shaft running to the elevator, which gives motion to a system of belts and pulleys, which propels a vertical bucket conveyer. Area farmers would empty their grain wagons into a pit under the elevator's central driveway, and the buckets would scoop and carry the grain some 60 feet up to the cupola-like "head" of the elevator. At the top, a spout could be swiveled to fill the separate bins. Boxcars (with coopered side doors to hold grain) reached the elevator from a Terre Haute & Peoria Railroad siding, and grain was gravity fed from elevator to railcar.

By the late 1800s, area farmers enjoyed access to one of the densest rail networks the world had ever seen. The 1908 history of McLean County notes that "grain elevators are found along the railroads every four or five miles, so that few farmers have to haul their grain more than six or seven miles to a point of shipment."

By the first half of the 20th century, elevators were increasingly made of concrete rather than wood, and older elevator operations expanded to accommodate the increased yields spurred by hybrid crops. In 1941, to cite one example, the Farmer's Cooperative Grain Co. in Shirley added three concrete grain bins. Standing 62 feet tall with six-inch walls, the bins held a combined 33,000 bushels. Built by Eikenberry Construction Co. of Bloomington, the bins relied on auger conveyers of the adjoining 1902 wooden elevator, which still held 25,000 bushels.

Regrettably, the old wood-framed elevators are disappearing from the landscape, going the way of corn cribs and other farm-related structures that outlived their economic utility. In January 2006, for instance, it took less than an hour to raze the 80-feet-tall Ballard elevator, a Route 66 icon situated halfway between Lexington and Chenoa.

The Hawes elevator ceased operation in the mid-1970s, and the abandoned structure weathered neglect and vandalism for more than a decade. In 1988, the city purchased the structure with the intention of demolishing what was deemed a public safety hazard. Yet historic-minded residents won the day, and after an arduous restoration the elevator was reopened as a museum in 1999.

Gibson City-based Alliance Grain Co., a farmer-owned cooperative, manages 13 elevators, including those in Anchor, Colfax and Saybrook.

All told, Alliance elevators can store about 22 million bushels of grain, and eight of the 13 elevators are serviced by the company's own Bloomer Line railroad.