An abandoned elevator and rail siding at Pixley on the Santa Fe's old Medicine Lodge branch.

Some of my earliest memories are of the annual wheat harvest and riding with my mother in a Ford Model A as she piloted a trailer laden with grain to the nearby elevators. Sadly it is something few children of today and tomorrow will ever experience. Not only are the days numbered for the rural elevators once so common a sight on the prairies, but also those of the small family farms of my childhood.

For more than a century the wheat farmers of the Great Plains were linked to distant markets by the railroad. Farmers brought their harvest by wagons, and later trucks, to a nearby grain elevator. The grain was loaded on box cars and rushed off to terminals like Salina, Hutchinson or Enid. Today, most of the grain is hauled directly to those terminals by trucks, so the prairie elevator and branch lines that carried the grain away have nearly disappeared from the landscape.